Liberal Foundations

President Obama’s new “green jobs” czar Van Jones, an avowed militant communist, had been on the board of the pressure group Apollo Alliance, which aspires to flatten the U.S. economy by having government fund “green jobs” scams, according to the “Glenn Beck Program” earlier this week.

Even worse, the green gangster group, which has ties to ACORN, SEIU, and Center for American Progress president John Podesta, has significant pull in Congress and helped to write the stimulus bill.

The Apollo Alliance “is designed to bring together the elements of organized labor with the community organizers with the green groups, the environmental groups, and to access all of the big foundation money that’s been supportive of those causes in the past,” explained Phil Kerpen, director of policy for Americans for Prosperity.

Jones described the group’s “mission as sort of a grand unified field theory for progressive left causes; it ties all these things together,” Kerpen said. He added

They really admire the Apollo mission, the moon-shot mission, and they think that we need a similar centrally-planned, organized massive mobilization to reorder society and take control of energy and their various other objectives. They admire that and they want it like a moon shot.

Beck asked if Wade Rathke, the disgraced founder of ACORN who was expelled by the radical left-wing group last year for covering up his brother’s embezzlement of nearly $1 million in ACORN funds, had been a member of the Apollo Alliance’s board.

Kerpen responded, “Yes. He’s on — he was until this year on the board of the Tides Foundation and the Tides Center, which are the parent organizations that host the Apollo Alliance.”

I just stumbled on an arrow in the left’s propaganda quiver I’d never heard of before.

It’s a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Political Research Associates, which operates the publiceye.org website. Its 2007 tax return (PDF) shows it operates on a shoestring budget.

The work of Political Research Associates has been strongly criticized by the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Stanley Kurtz.

In its mission statement, Political Research Associates describes itself as “a progressive think tank devoted to supporting movements that are building a more just and inclusive democratic society. We expose movements, institutions, and ideologies that undermine human rights.”

The group explains why it focuses on the right:

While attacks on civil liberties can come from any direction, the political and Christian Right use skillful marketing that exploits the public’s desire for quick solutions and capitalizes on today’s hectic information flow. With clever slogans that oversimplify complex public policy issues, the Right routinely scapegoats others in pursuit of their agenda.

PRA responds with fair and accurate analysis, looking beneath the sound-bites and slogans of the Right, exposing the true goals and agendas of specific leaders, organizations and movements. We then present our analysis in ways that can help the media, advocates and educators understand and challenge the Right.

On its website a table shows a continuum of right-wing beliefs. It divides right-wing thought between the Secular Right, Religious Right, and Xenophobic Right.

The group’s donors include left-wing funders the Ford Foundation ($385,000 since 2002), the Public Welfare Foundation ($300,000 since 2000), the secretive Tides Foundation ($278,601 since 1999), and the Barbra Streisand Foundation ($5,000 in 2000).

Embezzler Bernard Madoff, who swindled clients out of at least $50 billion, was sentenced to 150 years imprisonment today.

Very few media reports have focused on the damage that Madoff did to left-leaning foundations and political causes.

I wrote about this topic in the American Spectator in January.

The record-breaking fraud has forced the closing of the JEHT and Picower foundations, longtime supporters of leftist groups.

Left-wing groups funded by those charities include ACORN, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Alliance for Justice.

 
The “Glenn Beck Program” did an excellent piece on June 3 about Herb and Marion Sandler, the toxic mortgage king and queen, and their connection to ACORN and the inappropriately named Center for Responsible Lending. (The video clip is embedded above.)

Through their charity, the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation, they gave at least $5,723,222 to the ACORN network. Specifically, the charity gave $4,498,222 to American Institute for Social Justice (since 2003), $700,000 to Project Vote (in 2005), $525,000 to ACORN (2000–2001 according to Activist Cash). This excludes any contributions that either Sandler may have made personally to ACORN or its affiliates.

According to the “Glenn Beck Program,” the Sandlers paid ACORN to send out protesters to hound Wells Fargo Bank, which competed with Golden West, the Sandlers’ bank. If true, this is an explosive allegation.

The Sandlers have also given heavily to the Center for Responsible Lending, an ACORN ally that champions the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Their foundation has given the Center at least $11,200,000 since 2005.

The Sandlers are also deeply involved in an effort to push America’s journalistic culture even farther to the left. They have given a reported $10 million to ProPublica, a left-leaning investigative journalism outfit. Cheryl K. Chumley profiled ProPublica in last month’s Foundation Watch.

Philip Klein reports at the American Spectator that left-wing activist groups plan to spend $82 million to dupe Americans into supporting DMV-style government healthcare.

Danish enviro-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg had an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

He’s right to say that much of corporate America is pushing for draconian carbon emission controls because visions of dollar signs are dancing in their heads. They are more than happy to eat U.S. tax dollars in order to supposedly save the planet.

I would go farther than that. I would say that they are recklessly indifferent to whether the new energy taxes they support –whether they be direct (carbon taxes) or hidden (cap and trade)– will harm America.

We’ve been following the destructive lobbying of U.S. big businesses on this issue for some time.

Timothy P. Carney profiled the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) for us in the June 2008 edition of Organization Trends. Fred Lucas detailed the efforts by Al Gore to feed the global warming hysteria in the August 2008 Foundation Watch and also looked at the efforts by Goldman Sachs to cash in on that hysteria in the October Foundation Watch. In the August 2007 Foundation Watch Deborah Corey Barnes spotlighted Al Gore’s environmental scaremongering business.

House Judiciary Committee member Steve King (R-Iowa) is demanding congressional hearings about the twisted finances of the radical activist group ACORN.

“This spider web, this myriad web of ACORN dollars and revenue streams, every bit of them should be looked at, all the corporations that they are networked with all of the boards of directors of those corporations, the inner locking connecting, the faces that are the same from board to board,” King said. 

We explored this very topic at length in the November Foundation Watch.

King’s call came the same day that Judicial Watch released a pile of documents from the Department of Commerce. The documents show internal communications at Commerce regarding ACORN and the U.S. Census Bureau.

Meanwhile, Kevin Mooney of the Washington Examiner tried to attend a meeting at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and was denied entry by an ACORN spokesman. The meeting attended by representative of various left-wing groups was organized to come up with a PR strategy to deflect attention from ACORN’s corruption.

Was this photo taken at Shining Path headquarters? (just kidding) Disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke (left) and ACORN enabler Drummond Pike (right) in an undated photo taken in Peru. On the wall is a large poster of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. (photo: Pike’s blog)

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John Podesta’s left-wing Center for American Progress Action Fund has invited many liberal and radical groups to a meeting Thursday morning to discuss how to use rhetorical misdirection to take the focus off ACORN’s increasingly well publicized corruption. One of the groups, Alliance for Justice, is advertising the crisis management meeting called “Reframing the Attack on Voter Registration” on its website.

The intrepid investigative journalist Kevin Mooney of the Washington Examiner reports

Nearly a dozen left-wing advocacy groups are meeting Thursday at the Center for American Progress (CAP)  to discuss how to respond to a growing barrage of damaging news reports and editorial criticism of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform (NOW). [sic]

The strategy meeting at the liberal think tank is being described as a “briefing and discussion” on how to respond to the negative coverage. ACORN is currently under investigation for voter registration fraud and related allegations in at least 14 states.

Among the organizations expected to attend the strategy session are: Advancement Project, Alliance for Justice, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Center for Community Change, Common Cause, Fair Elections Legal Network, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and People for the American Way.

Bertha Lewis, billed as “ACORN’s new chief organizer and CEO,” is a featured speaker. [...]

Lewis is the ACORN executive who lied to Lou Dobbs on CNN last month. Lewis can’t stand controversial Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio and she said he claimed to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. As Newsmax reported:

What Arpaio actually said was that whenever he tried to enforce U.S. immigration laws, activists on the left accused him of being a racist, like a member of the Klu Klux Klan. He then went on to say he didn’t let the insults bother him.

Lewis refused to back down from her malicious lie, which is not surprising because when confronted, ACORN officials routinely lie, lie, and lie some more.

I suspect that ACORN and its allies will play the race card. Useful idiot Adam Serwer of the American Prospect summed up last fall what they’re likely to say in coming days:

The allegations against ACORN are part of a tangle of misinformation and insinuation that is being played out across the media, and within the Justice Department. ACORN, because of its advocacy on behalf of low-income and minority families, and its efforts to register voters in poor and minority districts, has become a focus for the right’s racial anxieties.

They’ll say conservatives and Republicans are sinister, racist scum who don’t want minorities to vote, and all the negative publicity is the result of a vast conspiracy that originated among scab health care workers on the planet Klendathu who all belong to country clubs that frown on same-sex marriage unless it’s solemnized by a non-union pastor who dines on endangered species and who enjoys maximizing his carbon footprint, yada yada yada, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

We’ve heard this fanciful narrative before but the difference is now a surprisingly large segment of the population is paying attention to ACORN’s illicit activities.

For what it’s worth, President Obama’s radical new nominee to replace Associate Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, used to serve on the board of LatinoJustice PRLDEF. (White House backgrounder)

Along with groups such as the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), LatinoJustice fought a war of attrition against President George W. Bush’s 2001 nomination of conservative Miguel Estrada, a Honduran-born immigrant, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Democrats in the Senate filibustered the nomination and Estrada withdrew from consideration in 2003.

A tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit, LatinoJustice PRLDEF hailed the nomination of Sotomayor on the basis of her ethno-cultural heritage. “As the second largest and fastest growing population in America, with a large pool of qualified individuals to choose from, it was wholly appropriate for the president to nominate a Hispanic,” the group said in a written statement. (PDF)

According to the group’s website, it gets some of its funding from George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

A search of philanthropy databases reveals other significant donors to LatinoJustice to be Carnegie Corporation of New York ($1,025,000 since 2000), Ford Foundation ($2,280,000 since 2001), Rockefeller Foundation ($1,275,000 since 2000), and JPMorganChase Foundation ($70,000 since 2001).

Among radical left-wing groups, it has a fairly garden-variety agenda. A captive of identity politics, it pushes for multiculturalism, diversity, bilingual public education, race-based gerrymandering of electoral districts, race-based employment quotas, tenants’ rights, and illegal immigrants’ rights.

LatinoJustice PRLDEF was known as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund until last year when it filed Articles of Amendment with New York State to change its name. (See pages 35 to 41 of its IRS Form 990 for the group for Tax Year 2007.)

(Note: This blog post was updated several times on the day it was posted.)

Kevin Mooney of the Washington Examiner has another good article on ACORN (which we profiled in the November editions of Foundation Watch and Labor Watch).

It begins:

Donations from financial institutions to the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now during the past several years for community redevelopment are open to misdirection and misappropriation, according to ACORN dissidents. Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup made grants to the ACORN Housing Corporation and other ACORN affiliate groups. The three banks are also among the top recipients of federal bailout money under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). [...]

The “dissidents” to whom Mooney refers are the ACORN 8, a group of long-time ACORN activists who are angry about ACORN’s lawbreaking and corruption. I’m quoted in the article too.

I wrote about the ACORN 8 in the American Spectator earlier this year and have an article in this week’s Human Events arguing that ACORN should be probed for racketeering (RICO) law violations.