The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, chaired from 1995 to 1999 by Barack Obama, is being portrayed by some critics of the Democratic presidential nominee as an attempt to push radicalism on schools. -Education WeekIt did, How'd that all work out?
Speaking with a very well-educated, nuanced and well-heeled acquaintance of mine the other day about the Trump rioters, he called them 'spirited citizens and social justice warriors,' I 'mercenary delinquents.'
The gentleman, who has a knack for punctuating the odd phrase and verbal with pityingly raised eyebrows and moue'd mouth of moral disapproval, learned from arch-ninny Bill Moyers, it seems, asked me, "Just how, exactly are they paid and by whom? The Kremlin is closed, you know."
That's a moueWell, the Kremlin is wide open, but is for another tune-up of a Public Television junkie.
I informed the liberally turned out Brooks Brothers Bolshevik who lives on Longwood Drive and worked at the Mercantile Exchange for thirty years, and has since honed his social justice warrior edge with Catholic Call to Action, that since the 1990's philanthropic foundations, public private and civic had been boarded and commandeer-ed by trained Leftists.
The mouth moued, " Oh, please, enough of your 1950's old white man hysteria about Commie bogeymen."
You can not wise a chump. I parted ways with a characteristically 'close-knot ethnic' style sobriquet concerning his penchant for onanism that rhymes with Flag off.
I am indelicate at times. One's hobby, is one's hobby. As Aristotle wrote in the Nichomachean Ethics, We are what we repeatedly do. " By the away, Lefty's often attribute that quote to Will Durant who was the spiritual grandpa of all of our Howard Zinn robots today.
Anyway, unlike the Longwood Drive Liberal of my acquaintance, I thought I'd toss out some facts honeyed by my sweet-natured belief in man's intrinsic good doing battle with sneaks, dummies and grifters,
The Trump Protestors, like the Ferguson rioters and the REVCOMS who goaded Black Lives Matter into staging a series of loud, obnoxious and untruthful provocations in Chicago's Mount Greenwood neighborhood, from the Saturday before election day to the threatened November 20th outrage to come, are funded by paid provocateurs through 501(c)3 charities.
These charities are led and directed in many cases by schooled leftists trained in investment laws and networking strategically.
These facts became very clear to me through my long career as a grant writer and development officer for three Catholic high schools.
Chicago Based MacArthur Foundation, Woods Fund, Annenberg Challenge, Lloyd Fry and so many of the larger family started foundations in this city are driven to radical leftist environmental, LGBTQ, political activism, community organizing and immigration issues by boards packed with leftist ideologues. This has been going on for a very long time.
The first letter turning down a request for support of financial assistance to African American young men attending Leo High School came from the Woods Fund and was signed by its Executive Director Barack H. Obama in 1996. !997, 1998, 1999 and 2000 grant requests and more than a few conversations with young man in the cat-bird seat helped seal my low personal regard for Barack Obama: Illinois State Senator, U.S. Senator and President of the United States. His boss, William Ayers, was running Woods and The Annenberg Challenge as well as training a generation of future CPS teachers.
How'd that all work out for everyone? I 'd say not so good.
The Ford, Rockefeller, Pew Charitable Trust and most of the providers of grants for Public Television and Radio direct money to holding trust like The Tides Fund.
Very few Americans realize there exists a large network of far left philanthropists and foundations in America dedicated to destroying the American way of life, our Christian-based culture and our free enterprise system. They seek to remove America from its constitutional foundations and move it toward a European-style socialism. Much of this effort is coordinated by a little known group called the Tides Foundation and its related group, the Tides Center. Over the course of its 33 year history, the Tides network has given hundreds of millions of dollars to anti-free enterprise groups, gun control groups, anti-private property groups, abortion rights groups, homosexual groups, groups engaged in voter fraud, anti-military groups, and organizations that seek to destroy America’s constitutional basis. All told, over 100 leftist organizations have received funding from one of the two Tides groups.
Leo used to get small grants from Quaker Oats, Peoples Gas, Lakeshore Bank, the Snite Foundation and others. These grants were shifted to more "systemic initiatives." Meaning CPS, ACORN, LISCs of all sort. Soon these words appeared Unsolicited grants not accepted.
Big Charity was now off limits to good causes.
Smaller family foundations dedicated to religious education and Catholic causes became the only resources available and that took many more hours of prospect research.
Money for 'charties' is denied to Catholic schools. Corporate Charities are sucked into Community Trusts and other mega banks. When Paul Vallas was CEO of CPS, I used to call him the Prince of Darkness, because he managed to establish private foundations for public schools and every private business that wanted a smile from Daley sent their civic boodle to the foundation on West Adams.
There were still great people out there the Cashel Foundation and Bidwill Foundation run by a wonderful women and one run by a Leo guy who did well and then did a lot of good.
A guy works all of his life and makes a ton of dough and wants to do some good with it. He sets up a 501(c) 3 and starts helping people through causes that actually operate according to their mission.
One of Chicago's largest auto dealers had his wallet lifted by me to the tune of millions of dollars over the last twenty-one years. He was a standout football quarterback who gave up the chance of college stardom to be a Marine in 1945, He went to China and watched the Reds swallow up that nation, came home, got a degree, married his best girl and sold cars.
By 1979 he was Chrysler's largest dealer. By 2000 he was retired, he took care of his best girl until her death, grieved and then went to Uganda, built a Catholic school, a church and decided to learn Spanish and help immigrants in Aurora. He also operated a Foundation in memory of his marriage and keeps a very vigorous eye on where the money goes.
He is a piker, by comparison to Chuck Feeney.
Chuck Feeney was very much like the gent I talked about above, He was a simple guy who served his country and came up with the idea of Duty Free Shops. His pile towered over the Chrysler Dealer from Aurora's. Chuck Feeney wanted to not only do good with his money but manage to give it all away. before he went home to Christ. The leftist lamprey eels swarmed to his back.
Chuck Feeney's charity became Atlantic Philathropies (AP). Grants requests fro Leo High School and Chuck Feeney read them. I got several warm and personal turn downs and encouraged to keep sending. Feeney gave to causes in Ireland and his native New Jersey.
Feeney has liberal political leanings, but his philanthropy was another matter – more rooted in a philosophical, rather than political, view of the world. AP’s record of grants can be best understood as an expression of Chuck Feeney’s personal background. Feeney’s family of origin was not a wealthy one, but it was rich in terms of values—including charity towards others. One gets the impression from O’Clery’s book that Feeney’s philanthropy gave him a chance to express some of his most dearly held personal values, as handed down by his parents and neighborhood. Said his daughter Leslie:
“He has incredible empathy with people, which has its roots in his Irish Catholic background. He is a real child of his time. One needs to understand those Irish American neighborhoods during and after [World War II], how they worked, how they helped each other. That’s a big part of his life. He saw his mother and father take people off the street, helping people.”
For Feeney, the chance to do something extraordinary for others in need was no light matter—not out of a desire to be ostentatious or court publicity, nor out of a sense of “guilt” that he had become a rich man, but more likely, perhaps, for him to demonstrate that his basic beliefs remained undiluted by his great wealth.
Soon things changed.
Unsolicited grants not accepted is usually a red flag that the red flag is spiked on the charity's hill.
In 2007 AP had taken on as its president and CEO Gara LaMarche, a veteran of both George Soros’ Open Society Institute and the ACLU, and that AP demonstrated a growing appetite to fund far-left organizations such as the Huffington Post and Health Care for America Now. (HCAN is an umbrella group of left-wing organizations spanning unions, MoveOn, and the disgraced ACORN network. It received more than $26 million—over half its budget—from AP and is widely credited with being the most effective outside supporter of Obamacare. See “Socialized Medicine Back with a Vengeance,” Organization Trends, March 2009). For AP, a foundation that owed its existence to Feeney, who has made personal donations to the Democratic Party and opposed George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election, LaMarche’s presence at AP’s helm seemed only logical.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Later in 2011, LaMarche resigned and Frederick “Fritz” A. O. Schwarz Jr., the chair of AP’s board of directors, left the board; more director departures followed in 2012. The net result was a decisive switch in direction for AP. Not a political switch, by any means—indeed, AP continues to generously fund various far-left causes after LaMarche’s departure—but a definite and significant philosophical switch, signaling that the intent of the foundation’s living founder must be given due respect. This issue of Foundation Watch will examine the circumstances behind this change in direction, and assess some of its potential ripple effects.
Well guess what, friends and neighbors. The creep who looted Chuck Feeney, Gara LaMarche , is doling out the dough to rioters all over America.
The Democracy Alliance has funneled upwards of $500 million toward liberal activist groups and candidates since Soros co-founded the group in 2005.
DA requires all members — which in 2016 includes more than 100 “finance titans” — to donate at least $200,000 a year to approved activist groups. . . .
Therefore, at this year’s meeting, Soros and other liberal leaders — including Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren and Keith Ellison — will discuss opposing Trump’s plan for his first 100 days in office, a plan the DA called “a terrifying assault on President Obama’s achievements, and our progressive vision for an equitable and just nation.”Democracy Alliance is run by Gara LaMarche! Here is what he pulled at AP:
In June 2010, Feeney expressed his misgivings about the current approach to grants again. Feeney “challenged the funding of the health care campaign and inquired pointedly how the new pattern of payouts on social justice and advocacy impacted on the foundation’s capital,” O’Clery informs us. One concern that seems to have been building on Feeney’s part was that multi-year grants to many causes appeared to be a surefire recipe to multiplying the foundation’s costs, tying up too much capital in administration versus actually accomplishing its goals.
This time, it was Schwarz and Sovern who rebutted Feeney – Schwarz said the health care grants had been validated by the Obama administration’s official thanks for the way AP’s dollars had helped sustain the campaign to pass ensure health care legislation. While O’Clerly is not specific about how Schwarz knew this, perhaps Schwarz was thinking of how the Obama Administration had made sure that Gara LaMarche was on hand in the East Room of the White House on March 23, 2010, to watch as President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
The White House’s praise aside, Feeney’s concerns remained. Soon after the meeting, Feeney turned to board member Harvey Dale (a longtime intimate) during a private chat and asked if he would approach Schwarz, McCormack, and Sovern to request they resign as board members. Dale advised Feeney against this, but went ahead after Feeney insisted.
When Dale informed Feeney that each had refused—McCormack retorted, “you will have to carry me out on a stretcher”—Feeney grew exasperated, but then decided to alter his tactics. In September 2010, Feeney’s circulated a 2,000 word “manifesto,” as O’Clery calls it, that amounted to a defense of his belief that AP should prioritize his beloved niche of large “bricks and mortar” projects such as hospitals and university campus buildings.
Wrote Feeney: “Personally, I draw a lot of satisfaction from this type of grant-making: it is uplifting to see an intelligently-designed project executed well and to know that it will be available as an asset for many future years.” Why? In large part because such projects represented, from Feeney’s view, the “highest and best use” of the foundation’s endowment, particularly when it came to helping foster productive medical research.
The strategy pursued under LaMarche, of making smaller grants more oriented towards advocacy alone, was not in Feeney’s view “a viable strategy to attain the highest and best use for our resources.” And Feeney added that “this style of grant-making is not one that I would have supported to any significant extent” when setting up AP.
Chuck Feeney fought back at the Board packed with leftists by LaMarche, " Feeney’s own money was being used to thwart his wishes—at a cost of $1,300 an hour in legal fees. (At this point in the story, one isn’t sure what the board could have done to more deliberately alienate Feeney.)"
Well Feeney 'threatened' to take his story to Oprah - how an endowment piled with Fenney's hard earned dollars was being looted by Alinskyite Soros agents to the tune of $300,000 in legal fees, not to mention violating intent of the donor.
After the (Oprah) letter came roughly another two months of meetings, memoranda, and efforts by the board to force Feeney to meet it halfway, to give ground on some of his criticisms. In March 2011, momentum shifted more in Feeney’s direction. An AP staff memo revealed a pattern of organizational overspending that neither LaMarche nor the board had been particularly attentive to: “staff had been let go with hefty packages and replaced; large amounts had been spent on consultants and travel; some of the grant-making was being outsourced; limousines were ferrying people to lunch; and lots of people were flying business class across America and around the world.”
The revelations of self-indulgence contrasted starkly with Feeney’s own famous self-denial (he avoided luxury and always flew coach) and bolstered his concerns about the need for wholesale change at AP. Feeney continued to make his case and, come the summer, he had reasserted himself completely. In June, LaMarche resigned, issuing a long public letter that paid tribute to Feeney’s philanthropic vision. LaMarche would be replaced by Christopher Oechsli, a long-time AP staffer and Feeney confidant. By September, board chair Fritz Schwarz opted not to seek re-election to the board.
Gara LaMarche, like every Progressive, bounces comfortably. He is directing funds to incite riots. Moveon.org, Black Lives Matter will flourish until an ACORN awakening takes place in the media that eats the brie with people like Gara LaMarche.
Me, I'll take a Chuck Feeney or an octogenarian English as a Second Language aide, who gave millions to Leo High School any day.
Can't wait for my next encounter with a Moue adept.
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