Ripping off taxpayers to finance America’s destruction by James Simpson

Trump is already rolling back big parts of Obama’s train wreck of an agenda and pulling our nation back from the brink and toward some semblance of sanity and the rule of law. One of the latest major changes, and one with significant potential impact on the Left’s ability to wage war against America, is Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recent announcement that the Department of Justice is ending payments to radical leftist organizations from the multi-billion dollar slush fund amassed by the Obama DoJ’s various industry shakedowns.

Peter Schweizer‘s Government Accountability Institute issued a report in October 2016, “Follow the Money: How the Department of Justice Funds Progressive Activists,” that detailed the stunning amount of money the DoJ has been awarding to left-wing groups. Under Eric Holder’s DoJ, financial institutions paid an unprecedented $110 billion in fines, much of which came in through out-of-court settlements.

Many of the cases were based on tenuous grounds, such as “disparate impact” which assumes racism based solely on the proportion of loans awarded to minorities. According to the report, “The DOJ used the threat of litigation—and the corresponding financial and reputational costs—to cause banks to take actions that a court would not have ordered them to do.”

We are still trying to figure out where it all went. But we do have some ideas. As with Obama’s corrupt green energy subsidies, it seems apparent that Holder’s DoJ extorted huge sums from banks specifically to funnel money to political allies. Schweizer documents how the DoJ flagrantly misused this money:

• Provided funding for activist groups previously denied by Congress.
• Incentivized banks to pay activist groups directly by counting each dollar donated this way as up to $10 against its actual fine.
• Funneled $53 million to Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA), led by a self-described “bank terrorist.”
• Gave $4 million to Asian Americans for Equality, an organization with communist roots and close ties to a North Korean sympathizer.

Once the funds were distributed, Catalist and other Soros-funded left-wing voter mobilization operations encouraged recipients to get out the vote for those who were “reliably progressive.”

With the DoJ slush fund, President Obama upped federal financial support to left-wing partisans astronomically. But the federal government has been funding the Left’s extremist, anti-American agenda for decades. There are literally tens of thousands of tax-exempt organizations that provide healthy incomes for millions of leftists who seek to destroy our nation, many of which receive some or all of their revenues from government.

Schweizer’s report quotes Cornelia Mrose, who testified before Congress:

In 2012, federal state and local governments gave $137 billion to organizations in the form of grants and contracts. Of that amount, $81 billion went to social service groups including affordable housing groups, legal aid groups, civil rights groups, and ethnic groups…

The report goes on to say:

…while the ostensible purpose of these organizations was to provide help for vulnerable citizens, the “real purpose” was to augment the “power, control and reach of government via an army of community groups.”

Almost every one of this “army of community groups” is left-wing. One good example is an organization I am personally familiar with, Identity, Inc. of Gaithersburg, Maryland. Identity describes its mission and vision as “creat[ing] opportunities for Latino youth and their families to reach their highest potential,” and adds, “[w]e envision a just and equitable society that nurtures all youth and is enriched by their contributions.”

“All youth” refers to illegal alien youth, of course. In reality, Identity is an illegal alien advocacy group that uses militant tactics. In 2011, Maryland residents advanced a petition to place a referendum question on the 2012 ballot to defeat what was then the recently enacted state DREAM Act — which provided in-state college tuition for illegal aliens. Volunteers needed to obtain 55,736 petition signatures. They received double that amount. However, in its attempt to derail that effort, Identity joined another notorious government-funded illegal alien advocacy group, CASA de Maryland. These were the kinds of tactics they employed:

• Screaming racist and obscene epithets in petition-bearers’ faces
• Blocking interested citizens from approaching petition tables
• Pleading with people not to sign
• Passing out misleading “Think Before You Ink” flyers
• Utilizing paid FieldWorks operatives who shadowed petition locations and coordinated by phone
• Calling police to make bogus complaints
• One petitioner even reported being spat at

Identity is almost entirely government-funded. Its most recent tax filingshows receipts of $5.2 million, of which $4.9 million — 94 percent — was government grants. Prior years show similar results. Your tax dollars at work! Similarly, CASA de Maryland, which has bragged about having such notables on its board of directors as DNC Chairman Thomas Perez and former Obama domestic policy director Cecilia Munoz, received $4.1 millionin government funding in fiscal 2015, 47 percent of total revenues.

According to USASpending.gov, National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest illegal alien advocacy group in the U.S., has received $28.7 million from the federal government since 2008. NCLR also received $3.1 million from Bank of America’s $16.7 billion settlement. Was the $3.1 million counted among the receipts from government, or was it hidden in direct donations from Bank of America?

NCLR works through a network of 260 “affiliates” throughout the U.S., some of which also received settlement money. The National Mortgage Settlement Summary lists a total of over $2 million provided to four NCLR affiliates: El Centro de la Raza of Seattle, Washington, ($600,000); NeighborWorks, Orange County, California, ($345,000); Unity Council, Oakland, California, ($575,000); and Community Housing Works, San Diego, California, ($500,000). Were these part of La Raza’s $3.1 million, or other monies?

NeighborWorks America is a congressionally chartered organization created in 1978 as “Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation.” It changed its name in 2005. While it is supposed to provide housing counseling in low-income neighborhoods and other housing-related services, Schweizer reports that, in practice:

“housing needs” encompasses not only direct subsidies to purchase housing, but matters as diverse as the question of the minimum wage, whether and when felons ought to have their voting rights restored, voting rights, getting the vote out, and LGBT concerns.

NeighborWorks was a conduit of disbursements to many radical organizations, including the aforementioned “bank terrorist” group NACA, and the North Korea-linked Asian Americans for Equality. NeighborWorks receives almost all its funding from government: over $2 billion from the feds since 2007.

Everyone remembers ACORN, the criminal organization that hid its finances behind hundreds of shell companies until its game was finally exposed by Capital Research Center’s Matthew Vadum and others. Between 1994 and its bankruptcy filing in 2010, ACORN received at least $79 million from the federal government. ACORN reconstituted itself under different names but old ACORN affiliates continued to receive federal funds. For example, in 2011, ACORN affiliate  Affordable Housing Centers of America (originally called ACORN Housing), received a $300,000 HUD grant. In addition, the Mutual Housing Association of New York, which was also part of the old network of affiliated nonprofits, received $50,000 from the bank settlement, even though Congress banned federal funds from flowing to any member of the ACORN network.

But the American Civil Liberties Union is perhaps the most notorious example. A law enacted in 1976 – to be precise, Public Law 94-559, the Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Act (42 USC, Section 1988) – allows attorneys to recover fees in civil rights and constitutional lawsuits against the government. The purpose was to make it easier for people of limited means to recover costs of lawsuits when their rights had been violated. As the definition of “constitutional rights” has broadened over the years, the ACLU has turned this law into both a weapon and a profit center. Its war chest gets help from taxpayer dollars each time the group wins. Following are just a few egregious examples:

• $106,000 for a lawsuit alleging a local library policy violates a child’s constitutional right to view porn
• $108,000 from Portland, Oregon for allowing the Boy Scouts to recruit during school hours
• $549,000 from the state of Alabama for a lawsuit to remove a Ten Commandments monument from a courthouse
• $150,000 from Barrow County, Georgia to remove the Ten Commandments from a courthouse
• $950,000 from San Diego for a lawsuit demanding that the city throw the Boy Scouts out of a city park where members of that group had been gathering at their own expense for decades
• $1 million (negotiated down from $2 million) against a small Pennsylvania school district which offered “intelligent design” theory as an alternative to Darwin’s evolution

There are thousands more cases just like this that you have doubtless heard about: forcing removal of Christmas displays, taking prayer out of school, forcing the Boy Scouts to accept homosexual Scout leaders, attacking voter integrity laws, etc. The list is endless — all of the traditions and laws that protect and define our nation and culture ripped from us while we pay the bill. Other left-wing groups use this law, but none as effectively or successfully as the ACLU.

The ACLU pleads poverty, claiming that these kinds of awards don’t keep them going. But these are truly alligator tears. According to Guidestar, the hundreds of ACLU branch offices and ACLU foundations nationwide have together amassed a total of over $650 million in current net assets. Most of this comes from private donations; however, when the ACLU is notdefending terrorists, it is also recovering the costs of its activities courtesy the American taxpayer.

And it is not only the attorney fees we pay. When the ACLU takes a case to court, we are paying all the court costs to indulge its rabid left-wing viciousness whether it wins or loses, and tying up courts that should be working on real cases. It still amazes me that the ACLU, a demonstrably subversive, partisan organization, continues to enjoy tax-exempt status as a result. And for those of you yet unaware, ACLU co-founder Roger Baldwinsaid in 1928:

I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek social ownership of all property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.

Baldwin left the ACLU in the 1950s, but ACLU’s extremist designs have never really changed. It is an agent of chaos, not civil rights.

Attorney General Sessions’s order to end the horrifying practice of sending billions of dollars to left-wing extremist organizations attacking our society is a great start. But that should never have happened in the first place.

Will congressional Republicans press for a review of all the thousands of radical left-wing groups receiving taxpayer support, both through their tax-exempt status, and the many cases where they are directly funded by government?

Don’t hold your breath.