[Editor's note: This is the second in a series of stories exposing a massive shell game with taxpayer funds that while not new, is being perfected by the Obama administration as a means to deploy and reward non-profit co-laborers in an effort to fulfill the president's stated aim of radically transforming America. It's a system in which complexity serves as a useful tool to avoid drawing scrutiny. The series will offer a tour of the landscape and ultimately address the implications for every citizen. In the first story, WND exposed a wealthy, left-wing Silicon Valley charity supported by the administration that, among other "progressive" causes, channels funds to the notorious Media Matters, founded by staunch Hillary Clinton ally and Fox News nemesis David Brock.
By Matthew Vadum
WASHINGTON – Known as a citizens' advocacy group, it nevertheless is one of the nation's largest private health-insurance brokers.
And when President Obama faced fierce opposition from senior citizens for cutting $716 billion from Medicare to pay for his $1.9 trillion expansion of health-insurance coverage to low-income Americans, the organization became one of Obamacare's chief cheerleaders.
It's no wonder then that the AARP network, one of the wealthiest, most powerful lobbies in America is receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from the Obama administration.
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Formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, the AARP has an unabashedly left-wing political agenda and is known as a relentless champion for expanding the size and scope of government.
AARP's charitable entity, AARP Foundation, recently received a three-year $3 million federal grant from the taxpayer-supported Corporation for National and Community Service, or CNCS.
The funds come out of CNCS's Social Innovation Fund, or SIF, a taxpayer-financed community organizing slush fund that the Obama administration uses to enrich its left-wing friends and allies in the nonprofit community, as WND reported. Such left-leaning nonprofit groups overwhelmingly lean Democratic.
In 2009, President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which reauthorized CNCS and its $1.1 billion budget and created the Social Innovation Fund.
The SIF was established the year after the Democratic Party's campaign platform advocated the formation of a "Social Investment Fund Network" to provide government funding for "social entrepreneurs and leading nonprofit organizations (that) are assisting schools, lifting families out of poverty, filling health care gaps and inspiring others to lead change in their own communities."
In this case, the $3 million is designated for the Women's Economic Stability Initiative, or WESI, an "economic stability" program aimed at low-income women ages 50 to 64 in select Southern and Southwestern states. Much of the money may ultimately end up in the hands of left-wing community organizers.
This $3 million welfare-like expenditure is in addition to the $920 billion the federal government spent last year on 80 anti-poverty programs.
The $3 million is also not included in the $22 trillion in taxpayer money given to the poor since President Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" got under way in the mid-1960s.
The $22 trillion figure is "three times the cost of all military wars in U.S. history," the Heritage Foundation's welfare expert Robert Rector notes.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., told WND in an interview that he wasn't familiar with the $3 million grant to AARP Foundation, but he's adamant that taxpayer money should not be used to advance the political agenda of any specific organization.
"The wealth the government has was extracted from the American people," the senator said. "It is entrusted to the government for the purpose of executing certain policies in the common interest of the people duly authorized by the Congress, and it is not appropriate for people who wield control over this money to direct it to advocacy and political-like groups to further agendas that are not shared universally and that really divide Americans deeply.
"So you see, what tends to happen is administrations like this administration, when they enact those abuses and spend that money improperly, it always advances their political agenda," Sessions said.
"And so this is not right, and Congress should be on top of it and watching it," he said.
Windfall
Since 2001, AARP Foundation has taken in nearly $1 billion – $961,641,746 – in federal grants, according to USAspending.gov. Funding has come out of the budgets of the Departments of Labor, Treasury, Health and Human Services, Justice and CNCS.
The most recently available IRS filing shows the foundation took in $191 million in revenue in 2013.
Moreover, in 2012, then-Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., found that the Obama administration's massive Medicare cuts would give AARP a windfall of $1 billion in insurance profits and preserve another $1.8 billion it already generates from its business interests.
AARP also receives vast sums from corporate philanthropies and philanthropies that lean to the left ideologically.
Among those institutional donors are: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ($7,643,981 since 2007); the Caesars Foundation ($3,300,000) since 2009; United Health Foundation ($1,798,161 since 2000); New York Life Foundation ($1,519,500 since 2003); Entertainment Industry Foundation ($1 million since 2009); Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc. ($1 million since 2006); Charles Schwab Corporation Foundation ($1 million since 2011); Metlife Foundation ($700,000 since 2004); the government-funded Neighborhood Reinvestment Corp. ($436,381 since 2008); Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ($374,000 since 2009); and Rockefeller Foundation ($190,000 since 2010).
AARP is actually a network of organizations.
What most Americans know as AARP is the network's so-called social welfare organization recognized under section 501c4 of the Internal Revenue Code. It is an advocacy group, so donations to it are not tax-deductible.
Its charitable arm is the AARP Foundation, a nonprofit that falls under section 501c3 of the tax code. Donations to the foundation are tax-deductible. AARP, the 501c4, is barred from taking federal funds, so it uses the foundation for its so-called partnerships with the government.
There are other AARP affiliates such as AARP Institute and the wholly owned subsidiary known as AARP Services. AARP is not an insurer, but it is an insurance broker. It licenses its name to providers of services and products. AARP also offers financial products to its members, including mutual funds.
Windfall
Giving taxpayer dollars to a left-wing group like AARP Foundation that doesn't need the money is not out of character for the Obama administration.
In the Obama era, government hands out money to nonprofits that share the ideology and political inclinations of the president who looks back warmly on his time as a community organizer in Chicago.
The federal government has been funding radical left-wing activist groups since the War on Poverty got under way in the 1960s. As outlined in "Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers," published by WND Books, the "War on Poverty" gave taxpayers’ money to community groups so they could "agitate against the status quo."
The Economic Opportunity Act, or EOA, of 1964 which provided for job training, adult education and loans to small businesses to "attack the roots of unemployment and poverty," introduced a doctrine known as “maximum feasible participation.”
The idea was that the government-funded groups spawned by the law were supposed to try to involve the poor in activism aimed at changing society. The idea had “revolutionary implications” because “it involved a redistribution of power,” according to academic Lillian B. Rubin. “The idea of ‘maximum feasible participation’ has captured the imagination of the urban poor, with the force of an idea whose time has come; it will not die,” Rubin prophetically declared in 1969.
In everyday practice, “maximum feasible participation” meant encouraging more people to receive government benefits such as welfare, said Howard Phillips, who during the Nixon administration headed the Office of Economic Opportunity, a now-defunct office created by the EOA.
"The way to fight poverty in their view was to expand government subsidies to elements of the population,” he said in a 2010 interview.
Government spending programs gave money to local groups as political patronage.
"What OEO did was fund some 10,000 organizations employing several hundred thousand people who worked to radically transform the policies of the United States without reference to either elections or congressional action," Phillips said.
This, in turn, stimulated demand for more government spending as taxpayer dollars became a kind of ever-increasing subsidy for Big Government activism.