Speaker Summaries

John Oxendine, Georgia Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner, addressed members and guests at the Madison Forum luncheon meeting, May 14, 2007.

Mr. Oxendine praised the Madison Forum and said it is the bedrock of our society, The concept has been with us since ancient Greece, and been perfected, and it is what makes the United States different from so many other places. People get together, they talk abut ideas, they talk about how they want to be governed, how they should be governed, what’s god about how they are governed, what’s bad about the way they’re governed, and they don’t have to worry about offending anybody. If it offends somebody, you don’t have to worry about the police coming and arresting you and put you in jail.

Mr. Oxendine explained that he is Insurance Commissioner and Fire Commissioner. The state fire marshal is his deputy. He said he regulates most areas of insurance except health insurance. Most of the large companies, such as Lockheed and Home Depot, are self insured under Federal Law, so they don’t come under the jurisdiction of his office. State merit, health benefit plans, school teachers and university employees come under a state self-insured plan. Federal and state programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid are also self-insured plans. PeachCare comes under Medicaid because they handle welfare. Basically, the health care his office handles is small business and family insurance bought from an agent.

He said he approves homeowner’s rates. If you are unhappy about your rate, you can call his office. He pointed out that Georgia has the lowest homeowner’s rates in the Southeast. In rating homeowner’s insurance he looks at geographic areas where climate, building conditions and expenses are similar. For automobiles, they look at the size of the state. Georgia is the ninth largest state in the country and has the second lowest car insurance rate of the top ten states. He also said Georgia has one of the more vibrant, competitive Workmen’s Comp markets in the country, and his office feels very happy about that.

Mr. Oxendine said that what his office really does is try to look at rates, look at company’s practices to make sure people are treated right. The other is what government really needs to do is not always run peoples’ lives, not always regulate, not always tell people what to do; it’s just to help families. He said he thinks that’s the best purpose of government. People ask him how he can be a regulator and a conservative. He said there is an exception of every rule, and we do need some regulation in the insurance business, because someone has to keen an eye on them. But that is not his main concentration. His main concentration is helping folks. He said, when you call his office, you don’t get a busy signal. When you call, you get a live human being answering the phone. He said when he first took over the office they had machines. He took them all out. If people are paying taxes, they have a right to talk to a live human being. Also, the office is open from 8:00 am to 7:00 pm. When asked why he did that, he said he couldn’t figure out why government offices closed at 4:30 if we are the boss. People who are busy making money to pay his salary, and maybe can’t make personal calls during the day, need access to government agencies. He pointed out that it took three days to get his son’s learner’s permit because the DMV office closes at 4 pm, but they don’t let anyone in after 3 pm. The same thing happens at the Social Security Office. He said his philosophy is that if you call at one minute to seven they will stay on the line with you until eight if necessary. He said if he had the authority all government agencies in the state and the whole country would work extended hours for the convenience of the people who pay their salaries.

Mr. Oxendine said that last year his agency collected about 22 million dollars just helping everyday people with their problems, such as - the insurance company won’t pay my claim, won’t approve a medical procedure for my condition, offered $10,000 for a car accident, and I think it should be $15,000; the agency will intervene, take you through, and try to get the case resolved to make you happy. If you’re not happy, you get a lawyer and sue.

He says his whole philosophy of government is helping families, and that’s why he enjoys what he does. What he’s been doing these last few years is being accessible, helping people with real everyday problems.

Mr. Oxendine feels that one of the biggest problems we have with government is, everybody is always concerned with themselves. Looking at the recent legislative session, a lot of people seemed to be concerned with their own political ambitions, looking at their own careers, looking at their own statements, and were actually forgetting what was right for the people of the state. That’s kind of the difference between a politician and a statesman. He said economic development is a prime example. Whenever economic development comes up, governors for years of both political parties would say ….I want to build this factory because I’m up for re-election in a couple of years, and I want to hurry up and get it open so when it’s election time, I can say …look what I did, I got this factory in your community. That’s good. We want factories. But maybe we also need to be saying …is this factory going to be open 20 years from now? Because most of the industry you open right now, it may not be here in 20 years. It’s going to go to Mexico. It’s going to go to China. It’s going to go somewhere else. Maybe we need to say…let’s not just try to compete with them, because we can’t in a lot of areas. Let’s focus on the areas that the Chinese and the Mexicans, and other countries can’t do. Let’s focus on the jobs they won’t take from us. But you have to build an infrastructure for that. You have to really think 20 years down the road. But the problem is a lot of politicians don’t want to. They want to focus on today …because, you know, if I set a good foundation for something that might not bear fruit for 20 years, and that our children and grandchildren would get to enjoy, by God some other politician may take credit for it. That would be terrible. And that’s what a lot of people think. He said he thinks a statesman is going to say…let’s help people now, but helping people now is making sure that we have the right economy for our kids and grandkids. Mr. Oxendine said he doesn’t see that so often, and it concerns him

Mr. Oxendine said he thinks the state of Georgia is at a fork in the road. We really have to decide where we are going to go in the future. He said we have been growing and prospering for so long in spite of ourselves. We have Atlanta as a great economic engine. People are leaving the rust belt and the cold and coming south. It hasn’t taken brain surgery in the past to have a good ripening economy in our state. In the future it’s going to, because all these other states are saying… we’ve got to be scared of China and Mexico, India, and everybody else. We’ve got to look to the future, and, he says, he doesn’t as much of it happening here as it should. He said he thinks Governor Purdue has started that process of looking down the road more so than in the past, but it still has a long way to go, and he says he is afraid we might get beat by other states. Other states are desperately planning ahead in a lot of ways we are not. Economically we may wake up and find out we are not the Empire State of the South like we were taught in grade school, and he says it really concerns him.

Heath Garrett, Chief of Staff for Senator Johnny Isakson, spoke to Madison Forum members and guests on at the regular luncheon meeting June 11, 2007.

Mr. Garrett said when Michael informed him that he was forming a group based on James Madison and the concept of true public discourse and dialog; he knew it was something he wanted to be a part of, not only as a speaker, but as a participant in discussion and follow-up. He commended everyone involved with the Madison Forum for providing an opportunity to do this because of the importance of the old fashioned concept of dialog in discussion of serious topics.

Beginning his Washington update, Mr. Garrett said, since he had last spoken to us, we had a little something called an election in November which had pretty profound consequences for our country in more ways than one, and obviously that will be a big part of our discussion on immigration. In that election Republicans lost a good number of seats in the House and we lost a good number of seats in the Senate. We now find ourselves in the minority in the U.S. Senate. As of today we have 50 Democrats and 48 Republicans. With the unfortunate demise of our Senator Thomas last week, we dropped from 49 to 48. The Democrats went from 51 to 50 with the Senator who is actually stabilized and improving apparently with some indications that he may be back on the Democratic side in the fall. It will be interesting to see what will happen.

Obviously in the House, Mr. Garrett said, we had an election where we lost. It means a whole lot more in the House that we lost, because once you lose in the House, you have no influence whatsoever in the minority, absolutely zero influence in what goes on. In the Senate, what it means is we have a little bit of influence as long as we can hold 40 Republicans together with the threat of the filibuster, which, as many of you know, if you want to talk about how many true conservatives there are in the U.S. Senate, you can probably argue, depending on the issues, somewhere between 38 and 42 on any given day on any given issue. And so you see how precarious for those of you who would identify yourselves as true conservatives, how precarious the situation is in the Congress of the United States.

What that has done for the first six months in Washington, he said, is create gridlock. You’ve seen the reports lately – the Democrats have been unsuccessful in passing a single item on their legislative agenda for the political campaign of last year. That’s because we have been able to hold, only in the Senate, not the House. The House has passed everything. Everything on that agenda sailed through the house in the first six weeks. It’s only because we’ve been able to hold those 40 votes, and it’s been a different 40 votes every time, on shaping or stopping every major piece of initiative that the Democrats campaigned on last year.

Mr. Garrett said we lost that campaign for a number or reasons. Most importantly we lost it on ethics and morality. The Republicans lost the trust of the American people because a number of people, many of whom were heroes to some of you in this crowd, starting with Tom Delay, over the last decade had created a culture of corruption and hypocrisy in the United States Congress. We as Republicans in our world have to acknowledge that and understand that. That was the number one reason. If you go back and look at all the data now that’s come out about the election, the number one reason why we lost was because of the ethics and morality, because of the mood of the country on our right where we lost a large number of swing voters. There are 5% to 6% of true swing voters in this country. In 2004 President Bush won 79% of the swing vote. In the final analysis, in the election of 2004, he won it 60 to 40.

Mr. Garrett went on to say, of that 5% to 6% swing voter in 2006, just two years later, the Democratic candidates won that vote 70 to 30. So in a 24-month span, things flipped. That independent swing voter is 5% to6% of our country, and they literally will switch who they vote for on any given election ballot, and every two to four years they are just going to switch parties depending on who is in power and what the mood of the country is at that given point in time. They control the elections of the day at the national level and in what you call those swing seats. That’s why even in South Georgia where Bush was winning 65% of two Congressional races, we lost, in well mounted campaigns, to John Barrow and Jim Marshall because we lost independent swing voters even in those districts here in Georgia in 2006. That has tremendous political repercussions for the direction of the country. The good news is that the gridlock prevailed. Mr. Garrett said he is one of those who happens to feel that gridlock is good as long as you are stopping or shaping bad legislation. We’ve been able to do that to a point. But there are a number of items on the Democratic agenda that are coming down the pipeline. They were successful in attaching the minimum wage bill to the Iraq supplemental. We were able to get enough tax breaks for a couple of years to offset that cost to most small business. But that was simply something we were forced to accept in regard to what happened. That will be the first actual piece of their agenda they get passed. So it will be interesting to see how the repercussions come in the economy two years down the road. We’ve had to fight the rear guard action in regard to that. They passed ethics reform, but neither house can agree. The unknown feature there is the House is planning on having the Senate Democrats kill any kind of ethics reform that was supposed to be signed into law. Nothing’s happened there. He said they’ve actually passed, in their union piece of legislation, out of the House - it’s now before Johnny’s committee, the idea of taking away the secret ballot for unionization across the country. That’s not a very popular position, but they’re going to try to ram it through the Senate some time this summer. It will be interesting. He said Johnny was going to try to stop it in committee, but that’s about an 80-20 issue against them in principle, but it’s very much a part of the political calculation of the revenue from the unions during their campaign. That’s coming down the pipeline. There’s a cloture vote today on a no confidence vote on Alberto Gonzales. This is a very complicated issue. If you notice, many Republicans have not been very supportive of Alberto Gonzales. There’s a reason for that. The White House and the Attorney General’s Office have taken the same attitude toward Republican Senators that they did toward Democratic Senators in our historical and traditional role in helping select judges and U.S. Attorneys in our home states. And so, while Republicans have not been openly critical of Alberto Gonzales, nobody’s been openly supportive of him either. Much of what we’ve actually read or seen of the Democratic criticism of both how the White House has handled this and the Attorney General’s Office has handled it is also shared by Republicans. Many Republicans may vote against cloture because it’s a political exercise, but if it gets to a vote of no confidence on the floor, we may see a good number of Republican Senators join in a no confidence vote for Alberto Gonzales, because the AG and the Administration have actually stepped beyond the White House boundaries, and unfortunately, are beginning to do what we criticized Democrats for years about doing. Our argument is we’re not supposed to politicize the courts. Our goal is not to put conservative activists in those places. We believe as conservatives that if you actually interpret the Constitution according to its original meaning you don’t have to be a conservative activist. We’re going to get most of what we want accomplished from the Constitution. We’re not going to get everything, because the Constitution is not exactly conservative; however, unfortunately and AG’s office and the White House have gone and created all kinds of political litmus tests now for appointees over and above and beyond what the United States Senators and even Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson believe about an individual from Georgia. So it’s a frustrating time.

Mr. Garrett went on to say there’s an energy bill that’s being brought up by Senator Reed this week that has major potential repercussions for the country. The Republicans were cut out of this process. It’s going to be an effort to try to either reshape the legislation or to stop it. He said he doesn’t know if the Republicans have the 40 votes to stop it. He mentioned two major pieces of this legislation that will raise our rates in Georgia almost immediately. First and foremost they have mandatory café standards for automobiles and they’re high. It’s mandatory. There’s no flexibility for technology improvement innovation. There’s no flexibility for car companies that figure out a way to do things in a better way. There’s no flexibility in the standard. It’s mandatory. It will be extremely costly, and potentially put our big three out of business in the short term while they are in a very precarious situation.

Number two, Mr. Garrett said, is that they also have very specific high quotas for renewable energy. But they are limiting their focus on renewable energy to solar and wind power. It’s very beneficial to the northeast given their current status and their lack of investment, their infrastructure over the last 20-25 years. They want to do it on the backs of the southeastern ratepayers. It doesn’t really benefit or help us. He said that’s a short oversimplification of that bill, but those two are deal killers for our senators, so they will be fighting an energy bill on the floor in the coming week.

Mr. Garrett said there are going to be a number of fights on judges. It doesn’t think there are going to be many appointed. Once through the August recess the Democrats may let one or two district judges go here and there, until they can come up with some agreement, to make it look like the Republicans are getting a few judges appointed and they’re not stonewalling everybody. But no controversial judge will probably be confirmed from here on out until after the election.

Also, he said, the tax relief packages of 2001 and 2001 begin to come off next year. The Democrats budget that they passed with a blueprint shows that they actually calculate all those packages running out and not being reaffirmed which will have significant implications for the economy over time. The Republicans will begin that fight, hopefully, in the fall, but they are at a huge disadvantage politically in that regard. And we all know that the President is now well into his lame duck status. Mr. Garrett said that while we all love the President for his principled position we have to realize there was only one President in the 20th Century who was popular in the last two years of his second term – FDR.

On the subject of the war in Iraq, Mr. Garrett mentioned the very sobering speech a couple of weeks ago. With the last troops coming into Iraq over the next 30 days to complete what everybody terms the surge we have to expect an up-tick in casualties because we all are unfortunately, maybe for the first time, taking the fight to our enemies in the most difficult terrain for the first time in that war. And, anybody who is a student of military strategy history knows, that when we start to go in to that territory and that terrain, when we let them build up institutions over the last 18-24 months because we’ve had both hands tied behind our backs for political and for military reasons, we’re going to start to fight, but we’re going to have to gird our loins for an up-tick in casualties and an up-tick in fighting in that regard. It was a very sobering speech, but got very little coverage probably because he gave it the same weekend that immigration hit the news media, but he’s trying to prepare the country for that. He said General Petraeus is doing an excellent job of changing the way we do business in Iraq, and it will be interesting to see whether or not we as a country or whether the congress has the political will to sustain this for six to nine months, give it a chance to see if it changes the dynamics of the politics and the military reality on the ground in Iraq. He said Johnny remains firmly committed to the principles of staying there. The one thing that was true in all the testimony of over 45 experts over a three week period, no matter how conservative or liberal it was, in front of the Foreign Relations Committee in January, was that if we pull out of Iraq the potential for disaster is much greater for spillover into the region. And, that civil war, not only in Iraq, but in the broader region is obviously not in our national security interests.

Moving to the subject of immigration, Mr. Garrett said most of us have asked the question – why is Johnny Isakson involved with this horrible, no good, terrible, horrendous, very bad bill. He said Johnny was somewhat of a hero on this legislation last year when the Kennedy bill hit the floor and was being debated in the Republican dominated Senate. It passed the Senate last year with 55 Republicans in the United States Senate. What Johnny Isakson fought for and lost was the border security first principle. He formed it in the form of an amendment where he actually created the principles of the trigger that said before anything else in this act goes forward we’re going to have border security and he defined it around five key measurable objective standards. At that point in time everybody who was for border security first in the country thought Johnny was a hero, and then here we go a year later faced with a very similar situation and a very different political context and, because of a picture, a lot of people are saying – what in the world happened to my United States Senator who was for border security first. Mr. Garret said he didn’t think anything has changed in principle with Johnny. What has happened is the political context is changed, but nobody is paying attention to that. As background, Mr. Garrett said first of all even though the Democrats were able to pass last year their bill, which anybody would know is far worse than the bill which was being debated over the past three weeks, with 55 Republicans in the Senate at the time.

Conditions in the Senate did not get worse for that bill over the last six months, they got better. With the Democrats taking control, with Harry Reid in charge, the prospects of that bill sailing through the Senate were dramatically increased in November of last year. In January of this year, Harry Reid came to both Senate caucuses and said “we are going to pull up, before Memorial Day, the Kennedy bill from last year and vote on it. If anybody wants to work on a different bill, you had better come up with your suggestions and work on it now. That’s my deadline. I’m pulling it up, and I’ve got the votes to pass it.” Mr. Garrett said there was no dispute that Reid has the votes, because it passed last year with 55 Republicans. Where they were able to stop the bill last year because of Johnny’s amendment, they were at least able to get the highlighted focus on border security, go to the House, and the House stopped it. With the Republicans in the minority with no clout, Nancy Pelosi would pass the Kennedy bill in a heartbeat. The only reason she is not talking about passing the bill is because she thinks it’s too conservative, and she wants to set the standard of 70 votes for Republicans. That’s because her caucus, dominated by the liberal left, thinks this current proposal is too conservative.

That’s the political context in which Johnny Isakson said – “all right, I want my principles of border security first included in anything that’s going to be discussed”. Then began the negotiation. Isakson and Chambliss were invited to the table for discussions on a few key aspects. They were not invited to be day to day participants in different meetings. In reality what was happening is, Kennedy was meeting with some people trying to figure out what they want. Chertoff and Gutierrez, and Kyl, and Cornyn, and Graham, and McCain, and all the other folks were meeting with different Senators at different times on things. They knew that Republicans probably had 40 votes on the border security first trigger principles that they had been fighting for the whole time. In an ideal world, Johnny Isakson believed they ought to be segregated bills. We ought to do the enforcement mechanism under current laws right now. We could do that. Or, at least segregate the bills and do the border security point as a stand alone. Mr. Garrett asked – why aren’t we doing that? He said, simple reason. The Democrats are in charge, and they are not going to do that. You just can’t argue that point. They have said flat out they are not going to segregate the bills, and they are not going to do any of the border security measurements, authorizations, appropriations, mandatory spending, employer certification. They were not going to do any of that unless the Republicans gave them something. And so that’s what this, “quote”, proposal is all about. And so it’s a matter of Johnny being in a position of either fighting for his principles, given the political reality on the ground in Washington, DC, or standing back and taking shots at it. He said reasonable people can disagree as to whether or not he should have just stood back and taken pot shots at the bill. The risk of that is three other options. And so the roll of the dice is, don’t participate, and the trigger wouldn’t be in there. We might go back to the Kennedy bill. They might just pass all of that. Or, fight for your principles. That’s what Chambliss and Isakson did. They fought for their principles.

Obviously, there’s a lot of debate about the individual aspects of the bill, but that’s the WHY that Johnny Isakson was involved. He was invited to the table to try to get the Isakson trigger in there, to get the border security measures, to toughen up penalties on employers, to make sure there’s no new pathway to citizenship, to try to limit things. The Republicans did not get what they wanted. They didn’t get 100% of what they wanted. Mr. Garrett said he believes they got 75% to 80% of what they wanted in the bill, and they are all arguing about that 20% to 25%, all the ideal stuff that’s out there. Unfortunately, they are arguing in a political context over which they have no control. The Democrats are in charge.

And finally, Mr. Garrett said, if this bill dies, and that’s a big if, status quo may reign for a few months. If the Democrats decide that it’s to their political advantage to pass the Kennedy bill, know they’ve got the votes in the Senate and the House, and they’ve probably got a President who will sign it. So that’s risk number one. The greater risks, which are risk number two and number three, are to stay with status quo, and we’ve got to understand, the Democratic majority in Congress is not going to authorize, appropriate, or do anything to increase enforcement of the current law. Republicans fundamentally disagree with that. They think it’s a terrible way to run a country, but that’s the political reality of the Democratic Party and their stance on this issue. That’s risk number two. So we’re going to go another two years with an estimated two million or more illegals per year for the next two years. And then we get to what Mr. Garrett calls the January 21st, 2009 scenario. Rush Limbaugh says there is a 70% chance of Hillary Clinton being elected President in 2008. So, he said, think about 2009 – Democratically controlled House, Democratically controlled Senate, Hillary Clinton as President of the United States. The roll of the dice is that we go two years with, as best case scenario status quo, and then we get the worst case scenario of all, which is a bill far worse than the Kennedy bill last year, because, remember, Kennedy even had to negotiate last year with some Republicans. At we think this year is proposed amnesty, wait until they give them all three branches of government. That’s the political context. That’s the WHY.

He said most of us know that Johnny and Saxby were not locked down on all the interesting proposals that are in there. Voters have had a seat at the table during that last three years of debate and have had full access to Johnny’s office. Johnny Isakson has been a leader. He has not lost his mind on this. He just has a reasonable disagreement about the tactics on how we should go about trying to accomplish the best principled stance he can get in the current framework.

Mr. Garrett’s final plea was that we also think about the political tactics of what we are doing. The two guys who represent us here in the State of Georgia actually agree with us 90% to 95% both in principle and practice. So we should engage in reasonable dialog with these two Senators who are among the top ten conservatives in the Senate. He suggested that there is a more reasonable way to make our point than organizing against the Senators and locking down on a position before the final bill and the final outcome. He said we have to work together to accomplish these things rather than yell and scream and call the Senators bad names. That doesn’t advance the dialog. He also said mass faxes generally get discounted. What matters is the individual message with a name, address, and phone number.

Mr. Garrett’s final point was that there are two major amendments that are non-negotiable for the 45 Republicans that voted to not allow cloture to move forward on the bill. One of them is the mandatory expenditure component amendment which actually takes any discretion away from the Executive Branch on the expenditures and makes fully operational the very specific and measurable border security principles outlined in the bill. There is no argument that the President has no credibility on this. He could have been doing this all along. And they are going to go after a number of other amendments to enforce the border. He said the Republicans are working hard on all those principles and will continue to do so.

Madison Forum member Phil Kent spoke to Forum members and guests at the regular breakfast meeting on Saturday, June 30, 2007, discussing his latest book Foundations of Betrayal.

Mr. Kent said he labels himself as a Constitutional Conservative. He is not a Republican or Democrat, but he does sometimes use candidates and parties as a vehicle for conservative constitutionalist thought. He said when he was growing up it was explained to him that both parties were really inimical to American interests. He didn’t understand what his father was saying when he told about the Constitution, and about limited government, and individual responsibility. His father told him the Republican Party is controlled by the Rockefellers and these elites, and we’ve got to fight them, and that’s why we’re for Barry Goldwater. Mr. Kent said he wore ea Goldwater button in the fifth grade. He said as he grew older he understood what happened, because the Republican Party was not as conservative party before 1964, and you had to fight for that party if you were a Constitutional conservative. Republicans didn’t win every battle until about 1980 when Ronald Reagan became president. And then what’s happened since 1994, a heady year, the Contract with America. We thought that conservative constitutional government would sweep the land with Republican control. We had a good ride for awhile until, as some of your Republican Congressmen have said, we lost our way, referring to the Republicans in the Congress. The Republican Party is no longer a constitutionalist conservative party. He thinks we need to remember and teach that if we want to effect change within the Republican Party we are going to have to retake the party. He says it’s a wonderful opportunity, very unique if you are a political scientist, because in both parties it’s kind of open season for all the candidates. So, he said, be very discerning, whether it’s at the local, state, or national level as to whom you pick and support. He said that what he likes abut the Madison Forum, because we do exercise discernment when it comes to policy issues sand with regard to candidates.

Mr. Kent spoke about his new book and how much he learned when he got into the world of the private, left-wing, tax exempt foundations. He said it’s stunning how so many of these huge foundations, founded by the captains of capitalism, were hijacked by not just pleasant intellectually honest liberals, but by actually radical globalists who actually hate American and they undermine America. They really are foundations of betrayal. There are probably about 68,000 private, tax-exempt foundations in this country. There were only about a dozen a hundred years ago. Middle America, the vast middle class, is shouldering the tax burden because theses liberal super-elites are dodging the taxes and not really doing the charitable, donor intent that they are required to do but pushing their own agendas and undermining America.

Mr. Kent said, think of the names, Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Pew, he could go on and on, and the book does, high-jacked to supports the very things that our Founding Fathers tried to instill in us and we try to promote. What he listed on the back of his book are the major foundations high-jacked to attack capitalism. He said the Green Agenda can be very dangerous, because the left super elites have not figured out how to basically control America and destroy our sovereignty. But they may have found it with the gospel of Al Gore. He said it’s amazing what these foundations are doing just in the world to promote green propaganda. Of course all of this is exaggerated, and it’s funded by the major foundations – Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Hewlett – it’s amazing who is funding what. Because you have to follow where the money goes. And what’s especially shocking for those people of faith is that a lot of these atheist, super elites like Ted Turner in Atlanta or George Soros, who is a very evil, hateful, and anti-American. Mr. Kent said these are atheists that are funding religious Christian groups to promote eco-propaganda. They are replacing the Holy Bible with the gospel of Al Gore, literally with their Sunday school materials, with their religious materials. And they want to divide the people of faith in this country. Mr. Kent said it’s plain because it’s not something that’s been going on the last ten years. Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and others have been doing this for the last fifty years, and the newcomers, like Soros, and Teresa Heinz Kerry, who’s a big villain in the book. He said the National Association of Evangelicals is particularly targeted. Some of the leaders of the Evangelicals, including very popular, best selling author Rick Warren, are buying in to the climate change propaganda. He said the ultimate goal of the left-wing super elites and the invisible government that they represent, and yes it is an invisible government, and more powerful, he thinks, than foreign countries, and sometimes even our own Congress. He said this is the only way, through implementation of their eco-agenda, which we will pretty much have a one world, controlled by the United Nations, billion dollar bureaucracy that controls our emissions and emission caps, and it will level the American economy down to that of other countries. It is to lose our sovereignty; it is to bring us down.

Mr. Kent said if we were to read the publications of these foundations and the one world groups, or they can be called globalists or internationalists, they really don’t believe in the U.S. Constitution or American sovereignty. A lot of people say, sincerely and innocently, why would President George W. Bush sign an agreement with Canada and Mexico to merge our economies together and to even plan to run a super toll highway through middle America, and it’s never discussed in the U.S. congress, hardly. Mr. Kent said he thinks it’s very simple. George W. Bush and hid Dad are globalists. They are internationalists. They believe in it. And the foundations keep fueling this and pressuring the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial branches, and if they don’t get what they want there with court decisions and with elections, they just keep on keeping on with the grants. He said it is incredible, if you look at what they are doing in various fields. He goes into all the fields. The cultural field, the field of sex education, how that has changed in the American education system in just the last 20 years. We have the Ford and Carnegie foundations literally supporting mergers with the Soviet Union, that communism is just a different system economically than our own free enterprise system. And we actually had a huge battle over what was being taught in the schools, that all cultures are equal. He said that’s crazy. All cultures are not equal. But that’s what the foundations have been preaching. And when you look at the attacks on our free enterprise system, they’re not just coming from countries that don’t like us; they’re coming from some of our major universities and the media. He said it pains him to sees what has happened in his own profession in the last 25 to 30 years. It is dominated by political liberals. There’s no question that the universities are dominated by political liberals, even Marxists, un-Americans. Why it is any surprise that the private tax-exempt foundations would be targeted by folks who don’t believe in our traditional core values and are dominated by them.

Mr. Kent spoke about George Soros. He said he calls him the Dr. Evil of the world’s foundations. He’s number two and trying harder. He names the Ford Foundation as the number one anti-American foundation, a traitor in our midst. He said those are harsh words, but the Ford Foundation literally has been funding so many things world wide. It has assets of $11 billion, and think of all the grants that have been going into the eco-propaganda, going into the open borders propaganda. They’re actually funding radical Islamic charities including the Arab American, the anti-American research institute which defends suicide bombers, Ford Foundation grants, and Rockefeller Foundation grants. The American Civil Liberties Union has not been known as a conservative group. The ACLU does do some good work in very few limited areas in terms of privacy and in terms of perhaps free speech, but other than that, Mr. Kent said he can’t think of anything else that they do very well. He said he thinks constitutionalists sometimes forget the Fourth Amendment, the search and seizure amendment, and of course, free speech. Free speech is not under attack from the political right, as some of these goofy liberals we sometimes hear from Creative Loafing or the Atlanta Journal Constitution think. It’s under attack from the hard left. Look no further than two students at Georgia Tech. They are two members of the College Republicans, one a Jewish student and one a Christian student, and they were actually stifled with their free speech. They were told that they could not put up their booth, and they had to actually go to court, and to beat down the speech code. Just like there are speech codes at a lot of these universities we’re trying to fight. The First Amendment doesn’t apply.

Mr. Kent said this is just a snapshot of what’s going on here and what the agenda is. Again, knock down traditional values, knock down national sovereignty. Keep pushing it, no matter what. These people don’t give up. He said he likes the Madison Forum, because we don’t give up, either.

Mr. Kent quoted George Soros who said, “The main obstacle for a just and stable world is the United States of America”. He said this guy doesn’t just hate George Bush, he hates the United States of America. George Soros has foundations in just about every country in Europe. He has the Open Society Institute which is very influential in America. He became prominent in 2004 by spending $4 million in anti-Bush radio ads alone. Mr. Kent says the man has his own agenda. Again, the green exaggerated climate change propaganda, to make sure the United Nations actually does have a carbon emissions trading control system where all the economies would have to work in sync under the United Nations bureaucracy. He actually has an agenda of open borders, free passage of goods and people. So naturally they would be supporting things like the European Union of a North American Union. So again, Mr. Kent said, this shouldn’t be surprising when you look at the overall agenda of, again, he calls the invisible government of the foundations.

Mr. Kent talked about Greenpeace. Greenpeace has offices all over Europe and North America. According to their web site, their big mission is to undermine the United States of America’s troops around the world. He said they take their boats into the Netherlands or Spain and they try to block our supplies from going into the Middle East or anywhere else around the world. That’s their big thing. They hate us. And they are funded, again, by all the big foundations.

Mr. Kent said that studying the Federal 990 Forms is the only way to figure out what the private, tax-exempt, super rich, elites are doing, by following where the money goes. The Ford Foundation gave the seed money to set up the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund in 1968. He said the Ford Foundation has nothing to do with the Ford Motor Company. He said Henry Ford II quit in disgust in 1977 when he said this is not the intent of what my family wanted.

Mr. Kent said that that the Attorneys General of all 50 states have a lot of power with regard to tax exempt foundations. He said we could put pressure on our own Attorney General in Georgia to start making these foundations accountable. Are they doing what their donor intent says they are supposed to do? Are they violating the 501(c)3 IRS tax code in engaging in illegal partisan lobbying? Of course the answer is that a lot of them are, and the Liberal bureaucracy and the IRS, which is supposed to police the tax exempt foundations, really turn a blind eye. He told about the Attorney General of Michigan, Mike Cox, who initiated a two-year probe, which is still going on, and he has really caused the super rich elites of the Ford Foundation a lot of sleepless nights and headaches, and he has actually forced them to do what a charitable foundation is supposed to do, help poor people, help educational facilities, help medical facilities. Foundations with political agendas spend a lot of money and yet they are not pouring billions into school reform or medical research. He points to Bill and Melinda Gates, who are not conservatives, although Melinda is pro-life. Their foundation is accountable, it has achievable goals, and they have benchmarks for where their grants go and if they are done properly. They have targeted the eradication of the top 20 diseases in the world. And to their credit, they have been funding in the United States as a top priority charter education. They are doing their donor intent, their charitable intent, unlike the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation has been so embarrassed by the Michigan Attorney General’s questions and probes into their grants that they have said they are going to go back and fund charities in Detroit and in Michigan where the foundation first started, where Henry and Edsell Ford had originally wanted a large share of the money to go for true charities. Mr. Kent said Detroit is one of the poorest cities in the country and yet the super liberal elites ignored the poor people so they could fund the radical Islamic charities and open borders and radical green groups. They claim to be for the poor and downtrodden, but they are not.

Mr. Kent suggested that we talk to Attorney General Baker to see what he is doing to make foundations more accountable. Also we should talk to members of Congress and ask for an investigation of the left-wing tax exempt foundations and make them accountable. He said the last meaningful Congressional investigation of the foundations was in 1953-54. He said he thinks it’s time for another one, and he thinks there would be Democrats and Republicans who would want to do this.