—Front Page Magazine
Former President Obama is waging war against the Trump administration through his generously funded agitation outfit, Organizing for Action, to defend his monumentally destructive record of failure and violent polarization.
Former President Obama is waging war against the Trump administration through his generously funded agitation outfit, Organizing for Action, to defend his monumentally destructive record of failure and violent polarization.
It
is a chilling reminder that the increasingly aggressive, in-your-face Left in
this country is on the march.
Acclaimed
author Paul Sperry writes in the New York Post:
Obama has an army of agitators — numbering
more than 30,000 — who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his
historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two
miles from the White House.
In what’s shaping up to be
a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isn’t just staying behind in
Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set up what will effectively be a
shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy, but to sabotage
the incoming administration and its popular “America First” agenda.
What
is Organizing for Action? It is a less violent version of Mussolini’s black
shirts and Hitler’s brown shirts, or of the government-supported goon squads
that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Castro brothers used to harass and
intimidate their domestic opponents.
OfA
isn’t, strictly speaking, a new group. After the 2008 election, the group, then
known as Organizing for America, was a phony grassroots campaign run by the
Democratic National Committee that sought to replicate the community organizing
techniques Obama learned from the teachings of his fellow Chicagoan, Saul
Alinsky. OfA was created in large part because the White House could not
legally use the 13 million e-mail addresses that the Obama campaign compiled in
2008.
Former
U.S. Rep. Bob Edgar (D-Penn.), sounded the alarm about OfA in 2013, suggesting
the group was dangerous to democracy. “If President Obama is serious about his
often-expressed desire to rein in big money in politics, he should shut down
Organizing for Action and disavow any plan to schedule regular meetings with
its major donors,” he said as president of the left-wing group Common Cause.
“Access to the President should never be for sale.”
“With
its reported promise of quarterly presidential meetings for donors and
‘bundlers’ who raise $500,000, Organizing For Action apparently intends to
extend and deepen the pay-to-play Washington culture that Barack Obama came to
prominence pledging to end,” Edgar said. “The White House’s suggestion this
week that this group will somehow be independent is laughable.”
But
Edgar’s admonitions were ignored and since then Organizing for Action has
thrived and grown rich, just like the Obamas.
As FrontPage previously reported, Obama
has rented a $5.3 million, 8,200-square-foot, walled mansion in Washington’s
Embassy Row that he is using to command his community organizing cadres.
Michelle Obama will join the former president there as will the Obama Foundation.
To stay on track, Obama wants his former labor secretary, Tom Perez, to win the
chairmanship of the DNC in a party election later this month. “It’s time to
organize and fight, said Perez who appears to be gaining on frontrunner
and jihadist Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.). “We must stand up to protect
President Obama’s accomplishments,” adding, “We’re going to build the strongest
grassroots organizing force this country has ever seen.”
No
ex-president has ever done this before, sticking around the nation’s capital to
vex and undermine his successor. Of course, Obama is unlike any president the
United States has ever had. Even failed, self-righteous presidents like Jimmy
Carter, who has occasionally taken shots at his successors, didn’t stay behind
in Washington to obstruct and disrupt the new administration.
Organizing
for Action, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose its donors, is
at the head of Obama’s network of left-wing nonprofit groups. OfA, Sperry
warns, has “a growing war chest and more than 250 offices across the country.”
On
its website, the group claims that there are “5 million Americans who’ve taken
action” with OfA, and that those individuals “are part of a long line of people
who stand up and take on the big fights for social justice, basic fairness,
equal rights, and expanding opportunity.” Among its key issues are “turning up
the heat on climate change deniers,” comprehensive immigration reform (which
includes mass amnesty), “telling the stories of the millions who are seeing the
life-saving benefits of Obamacare,” fighting for “a woman’s health care” which
is “a basic right,” and redistributing wealth from those who earned it to those
who didn’t.
OfA
communications director Jesse Lehrich told Memphis-based WREG that the “grassroots
energy that’s out there right now is palpable.” The group is “constantly
hearing from volunteers who are excited to report about events they’re
organizing around and all of the new people that want to get involved.”
Organizing
for Action is drowning in money, by nonprofit standards.
By
the end of 2014, OfA, which was formally incorporated only the year before, had
taken in $40.4 million, $26 million of which was raised in 2014, according to
the organization’s IRS filings. OfA’s big donors are members of the George
Soros-founded Democracy Alliance, a donors’ consortium for left-wing
billionaires devoted to radical political change. Among the DA members donating
to OfA are: Ryan Smith ($476,260); Marcy Carsey ($250,000); Jon Stryker
($200,000); Paul Boskind ($105,000); Paul Egerman ($100,000); and Nick Hanauer
($50,000).
OfA
also runs a project called the Community Organizing Institute (COI) which it
says partners “with progressive groups and organizations to educate, engage,
and collaborate.”
Organizing
for Action describes COI in almost lyrical terms:
Building upon the rich
history of community organizing in Chicago, the COI is a place to share
stories, best practices, and innovations in order to build our community and
empower individuals in the fight for change. It is a shared space for
organizers, policy makers, advocates, and change-agents to come together for
workshops, panel discussions, presentations, trainings, film screenings, and
social gatherings—building a strong foundation for partnerships.
Translation:
at COI you can learn how to spark riots, get arrested to make a political
statement, organize lynch mobs and voter fraud on a massive scale, intimidate
and shake down corporations, blackmail lenders, race-bait public officials and
businesses into submission, smear and terrorize your opponents, shield illegal
aliens from law enforcement, lead squatters to invade foreclosed homes,
encourage welfare fraud, and use tax dollars to promote cockamamie
social-engineering schemes.
Obama
is “intimately involved” in OfA’s operations and issues tweets from the group’s
account, Sperry writes. “In fact, he gave marching orders to OFA foot soldiers
following Trump’s upset victory.”
“It
is fine for everybody to feel stressed, sad, discouraged,” Obama said in a
post-election conference call from the White House. “But get over it.”
Progressives have to “move forward to protect what we’ve accomplished.”
“Now
is the time for some organizing,” he said. “So don’t mope.”
Organizing
for Action has been doing anything but moping.
In recent weeks its activists organized
marches across the country. Some became riots. After President Trump issued
Executive Order 13769 temporarily banning visitors from seven terrorism-plagued
Muslim countries, OfA organized “spontaneous” demonstrations at airports.
Obama praised the airport
rabble-rousers, saying through a spokesman he was “heartened by the level of
engagement taking place in communities around the country.”
“Citizens exercising their Constitutional
right to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by the elected
officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake.”
Reinforcements are coming to beef up
Organizing for Action’s position, Sperry adds.
OfA will be soon aided by “the National
Democratic Redistricting Committee, launched last month by Obama pal Eric
Holder to end what he and Obama call GOP ‘gerrymandering’ of congressional districts.”
And more unruly protests, rioting, and
violent attacks on Trump supporters will follow.
Matthew Vadum, Bombthrowers, and matthewvadum.blogspot.com,
is an investigative reporter at a watchdog group in Washington, D.C.
His
new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada), and as an e-book
at Kobo(Canada).
