[Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of articles 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. The second story shows how taxpayers are funding one of the nation’s largest health-insurance brokers, which had a significant role in passing Obamacare and remains one of its chief cheerleaders.
By Matthew Vadum
The Obama administration is channeling millions of dollars of taxpayer funds through a “propaganda machine” that finances organizations such as an educational advocacy group named for President Obama’s Marxist law-school mentor, known for his promotion of the radical “critical race theory.”
The distributor of the funds is the New York-based Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, which works with leftist grant-makers such as radical billionaire philanthropist George Soros’s Open Society Institute to promote “progressive causes.”
In the Obama era, government distributes taxpayer funds to nonprofit organizations that share the ideology and political inclinations of a president who looks back warmly on his time as a community organizer in Chicago.
Obama has personal ties to at least one group that the Clark Foundation has funded.
The money come out of the taxpayer-supported Corporation for National and Community Service’s (CNCS) Social Innovation Fund (SIF), a community organizing slush fund that the Obama administration uses to enrich its left-wing friends and allies in the nonprofit community. Such left-leaning nonprofit groups overwhelmingly lean Democratic.
In 2009, 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.”
SIF gave the left-wing Edna McConnell Clark Foundation $10 million in 2010, $10 million in 2011 and $10 million in 2012.
Working with Soros’s Open Society Institute, the foundation distributes the funding to subgrantee groups focused on “improving the educational skills and workforce readiness of economically disadvantaged young people as well as helping them to avoid high-risk behavior.”
Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., expressed concern in an interview with WND.
Asked what he thought about the Obama administration funding of ideological groups, Forbes said, “I can tell you this, that we’re seeing that funding source happen with a lot of liberal groups across the country.”
Forbes also approvingly cited the research of Christian activist and author Kelly Monroe Kullberg, who found that Soros, who funds the Clark Foundation, was also funding the pro-open borders group National Immigration Forum.
“Soros and his allies have an interest in border and culture manipulation – not in the Bible, American sustainability or the church,” Kullberg wrote.
“For decades, Soros’s team has weakened Judeo-Christian cultures by funding anti-Christian policies such as pansexuality, abortion, and the legalization of prostitution and drugs,” she said.
“They were among the first funders of Obama’s campaigns for Senate and president, and they fund ACORN, Al Franken, Van Jones, the Center for American Progress (Obama’s policy think tank), La Raza and many efforts to weaken borders and escalate debt.
“Soros profits from chaos. Perhaps we should pay attention.”
The foundation is named after Edna McConnell Clark, daughter of 19th century perfumer David Hall McConnell, founder of cosmetic giant Avon.
The foundation, which has been described as a propaganda machine, has had a dramatic impact in shaping the debate over crime and punishment. It has underwritten prisoners’ rights lawsuits that have clogged the courts and championed the idea that the U.S. jails hold too many otherwise harmless criminals. It also promotes the idea that the justice system is hopelessly racist.
The groups that get government money from the foundation toe the foundation’s line.
Like many of the groups receiving grants from the Social Innovation Fund, the Clark Foundation doesn’t need the money.
FoundationSearch, a proprietary database focused on philanthropic organizations, ranks the foundation 28th by assets in the state of New York and 121st by assets in the U.S. In the reporting year ended September 2013, the Clark Foundation disclosed it had $965.3 million in assets and yearly income of $106.1 million.
Obama’s Marxist, race-obsessed prof
The Clark Foundation has given grants to the Dorchester, Massachusetts-based organization BELL, which has a connection to Obama.
According to the group’s website, BELL is an acronym for Building Educated Leaders for Life. It was incorporated in 1992 and named in honor of the late Professor Derrick A. Bell Jr., Harvard Law’s first black tenured professor.
Bell – Obama’s Marxist mentor when he studied at Harvard Law School – was a proponent of critical race theory, the multi-culturalist left’s race-obsessed spinoff of critical legal theory.
Obama’s esteem of Bell and his teaching was captured in a 1991 video famously teased by Andrew Breitbart in February 2012 and released a few weeks later, shortly after Breitbart’s sudden death. Breitbart told a CPAC audience the video would show why “racial tension and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.”
Obama said, introducing Bell in 1991, the professor’s “scholarship has opened up new vistas and new horizons, and changed the standards of what legal writing is about.”
“Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell,” Obama told students.
Critical legal theory contends the law is concerned with power, not justice.
It sees the law as a fraud perpetrated on the people, an oppressive tool of capitalism, imperialism, sexism, racism and other “isms” it is currently fashionable to attack.
Advocates essentially believe the legal system should be criticized endlessly as a means of tearing it down.
Communists naturally have embraced critical legal theory as a way of changing American society.
Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals describes so-called critical legal studies as “horse manure.”
Critical race theory incorporates critical legal theory and parlays it into what one writer calls “a cult of anti-white resentment.”
Critical race theory enthusiast Dorothy Brown, an Emory University law professor, has written that critical race theory “seeks to highlight the ways in which the law is not neutral and objective, but designed to support White supremacy and the subordination of people of color.”
Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit has described critical race theorists as the “lunatic core” of “radical legal egalitarianism.”
Both critical legal theory and critical race theory encourage judges to graft their own political philosophy onto their decision-making process and use their power to change the way American society works.
Don’t confuse me with the facts
Radical Harvard Law professor Charles J. Ogletree is BELL’s board chairman emeritus. He mentored both Barack and Michelle Obama at Harvard and is now a close friend of the Obamas who has said they still call on him for advice.
In a Boston Globe feature in 2013, Ogletree said he talked to President Obama “sometimes weekly, sometimes daily, depending on the issue.”
Ogletree, a leader in the Maoist-based Black Panther movement at Stanford University in the early 1970s, became co-chairman in 2000 of a group called the Reparations Coordinating Committee, which pursued a lawsuit to win reparations for descendants of African slaves.
He founded Harvard’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.
Ogletree admitted to hiding the video of Bell and Obama made public by Breitbart.com, because he wanted to protect Obama during the 2008 election campaign.
“Of course we hid this throughout the 2008 campaign,” Ogletree said. “I don’t care if they find it now.”
In August 2014, after white Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown, a young black man who attacked him, Ogletree demanded Wilson be arrested even before basic facts were known about the shooting.
“I think the first thing that needs to happen [is] we need to arrest Officer Wilson,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“He shot and killed a man, shot him multiple times. And he’s walking free. No one knows anything about him, no one knows why he did it. We need to have that done, number one.”
After an extensive investigation, however, a local grand jury refused to indict Wilson. Even Attorney General Eric Holder’s race-obsessed Department of Justice refused to recommend charges against Wilson after its own investigation.
Radical socioeconomic change
Renowned conservative thinker Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has accused the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation of using housing policy as a vehicle for radical socioeconomic change.
One Clark Foundation-supported group in New York City lobbied against the city selling off its tax-defaulted real estate holdings, Mac Donald reported. Jay Small, then-director of the Association of Neighborhood Housing Developers, argued that when the city assumes ownership of housing, the property should never be privately owned again.
“Ultimately, the solution to the housing crisis is to change property relations,” Small said, adding that he was using “a code word for socialism.”
Mac Donald said no other foundation “has had as dramatic an impact in shaping the debate over crime and punishment.”
“Clark has tirelessly sponsored the specious notion that the U.S. incarcerates too many harmless criminals,” she said.
The foundation has also done “a great public disservice” by injecting race into discussions about crime, she wrote.
Not everything the foundation does is tainted by ideology. The Clark Foundation funds some causes such as charter schools that have appeal across the political spectrum.
But it is part of the constellation of advocacy organizations whose members tend to see government as a better problem solver than free citizens coming together in civil society to solve problems.
And the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation clearly shares Barack Obama’s belief that government is the solution to all, or nearly all, of society’s problems.
