The left-wing astroturfers of ACORN’s new front group in California, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), were behind a garbage-dumping stunt at a branch of Wells Fargo bank in San Jose, Calif.

News reports consistently depict the players as angry homeowners who spontaneously erupted in a spasm of righteous indignation.

As if.

These “homeowners” were reportedly unhappy about the upkeep at a foreclosed property they thought Wells Fargo was responsible for so they decided to dump uncollected garbage at the bank. The problem is that while Wells Fargo is listed as a trustee for the property, it is actually owned by Bank of America, a longtime ACORN ally. (In recent years Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc. has given $5 million to the mortgage bubble generators at ACORN Housing Corp.)

In a still from a TV news report on ACORN’s act of political theater (shown above) an angry protester can be seen holding a sign that reads: “MAKE THE BANKS PAY! ACCE.” (Full video is here.)

Whoops.

ACORN has long waged a war against Wells Fargo. As I explain in my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, the competitors of Wells Fargo paid ACORN handsomely to blacken the bank’s name.

Predatory lenders Herb and Marion Sandler paid ACORN $11 million over the years to attack Wells Fargo, the main competition in California for their lending institution, World Savings Bank. The Sandlers are radical left-wingers who belong to George Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a club of billionaires that funds political infrastructure aimed at pushing America to the left.

The Sandlers are loan sharks whom Time magazine included in its “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis” list. They preyed on the poor for years and paid ACORN, which also preys on the poor, to help them.

Such garbage.

* * * * *

America needs to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.

Buy the book Subversion Inc. at Amazon and in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million bookstores. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.

Recap: Radical funder George Soros’s $1 million gift to Media Matters, a left-wing character assassination machine, underwrites its campaign to stigmatize conservative ideas. For weeks Eric Boehlert of Media Matters attacked Glenn Beck because a disturbed viewer plotted to shoot up the offices of the left-wing Tides Foundation. The shooter, Byron Williams, failed, but in December when a fan of Media Matters, the late Florida school board shooter Clay Duke, wreaked havoc, Boehlert and Media Matters remained silent.

Soros is also bankrolling a documentary that celebrates left-wing terrorists who plotted to napalm Republicans at the 2008 GOP convention in Minnesota. Even worse, you too are bankrolling the film through your taxes.

A trailer for the left-wing film Better This World suggests that it depicts David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder as idealistic activists who, according to the official blurb, “set out to prove the strength of their political convictions to themselves and their mentor.” In fact McKay and Crowder are convicted domestic terrorists who manufactured instruments of death calculated to inflict maximum pain and bodily harm on people whose political views they disagreed with.

You can be sure that if it was right-wing terrorists who were plotting to attack the Democratic National Convention, whoever foiled the conspiracy would be immortalized in film, literature and song as a savior of democracy.

“If you flip the equation around and it had been a group of conservatives threatening to use force to prevent those on the Left from meeting, everyone would expect the government to infiltrate them and they would also expect the FBI to stop them and charge them with crimes,” said Brandon Darby, who helped the FBI thwart the planned attack. (Darby’s essay on political violence appeared on Big Government over the past weekend. Read it here.)

The movie, which is expected to be released this year, attacks Darby, a true American hero who undermined the conspiracy by alerting the FBI. Filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega twist the facts to argue that Darby, a former revolutionary activist, manipulated McKay and Crowder into becoming would-be mass murderers.

It’s an easily disproved lie. During sentencing, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis went out of his way to make a specific legal finding that McKay obstructed justice by falsely accusing Darby of inducing him to manufacture the incendiary devices.

McKay and Crowder had made homemade riot shields and were ready to use them in St. Paul to help demonstrators block streets near the Xcel Energy Center. The goal was to shut down the democratic process by preventing GOP delegates from participating in the convention. The shields were discovered and confiscated.

During a search of a residence, police found gas masks, slingshots, helmets, knee pads and eight Molotov cocktails consisting of bottles filled with gasoline with attached wicks made from tampons. “They mixed gasoline with oil so it would stick to clothing and skin and burn longer,” Darby said.

Thanks to Darby’s cooperation with the FBI, the two aspiring bomb throwers are now languishing in prison. McKay entered a “guilty” plea and was sentenced in May 2009 to 48 months in prison plus three years of supervised release for possession of an unregistered “firearm,” illegal manufacture of a firearm and possession of a firearm with no serial number. A week before, Crowder cut a deal with prosecutors and was sentenced to 24 months in prison for possession of an unregistered firearm. McKay received the stiffer sentence in part because he fabricated the tall tale about Darby’s involvement in the plot.

Of course, it should surprise no one that Hollywood loves this kind of story with its anti-American overtones. HBO gave a grant to the filmmakers to produce their pro-terrorist propaganda. So did the Soros-funded Sundance Institute. After Soros’s foundation, the Open Society Institute (OSI), gave Sundance’s Documentary Film Program $4.6 million in 2002, it gave the institute another $5 million in 2009.

Taxpayers also underwrite Sundance’s adventures in social justice indoctrination. According to nonprofit tax returns (known as IRS Form 990s), the Sundance Institute has taken in $11,240,081 in government grants since 1997. It is unclear which governments made the grants because the 990 forms lump all the grant-making governments together.

The federal government has given $1,350,000 to the institute since 2000, according to USAspending.gov. All but $5,000 of the money was from the National Endowment for the Arts. (The $5,000 grant was from the State Department.) It’s not clear if the $1,350,000 is part of the $11 million-plus figure for all government grants.

Upon receiving the most recent OSI grant, Sundance founder Robert Redford obediently genuflected before Soros. “Sundance Institute has supported documentary storytellers since its beginning,” said Redford. “The recognition of that history by George Soros and the Open Society Institute, and the continuation of our relationship over time, speaks to our shared belief that culture—in this case documentary film—is having a profound impact in shaping progressive change.”

Soros himself has acknowledged he is interested in the movies because “[d]ocumentary films raise awareness and inspire action.” He hails cinema for its power to manipulate audiences. OSI has been underwriting “social justice” documentaries since 1996. In 2001 Soros let Redford’s Sundance Institute take over management of his Soros Documentary Fund, which has since rechristened the Soros/Sundance Documentary Fund. (See Foundation Watch, March 2008).

In 2005 Soros acquired 2.6 million shares of the huge diversified media company Time Warner. In 2006 his companies, Soros Strategic Partners and Dune Capital Management, paid $900 million to buy the DreamWorks SKG film library from Viacom, a move that gave Soros the DVD and rebroadcasting rights to films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), Gladiator (2000), and American Beauty (1999). As James Hirsen noted, the transaction gives Soros “some highly desirable film rights at a time when the marketing and distribution model is changing to video on demand, video iPods and other forms of digital distribution.” But more importantly, it gives Soros “a presence in Hollywood where likeminded libs are ready, willing and able to collaborate in cinematic social engineering.”

Soros is also venturing into media overseas. In 2008 Soros Fund Management plunked down $100 million for 3% of India’s Reliance Entertainment, a $3 billion conglomerate that aims to provide Internet-based TV programs in India. Reliance also churns out movies and owns movie houses, radio stations and social networking websites in the country with one of the fastest growing economies in the world. When in the 1980s Soros set up offices in Eastern Europe for OSI, he helped to finance publishers, independent TV and radio outlets, and political parties.

As writer Rondi Adamson observed, “most of the documentaries that receive Sundance funding are highly critical of some aspect of American life, capitalism or Western culture. The projects generally share Soros’s worldview that America is a troubling if not sinister influence in the world, that the War on Terror is a fraud and terrorists are misunderstood freedom fighters, and that markets are fundamentally unjust.”

The 2009 Sundance Film Festival screened the documentary Disturbing the Universe. The recently deceased Communist historian Howard Zinn described the movie about radical anti-American lawyer William Kunstler as “a wonderful, inspiring film.”

Putting America in its Place
Undermining America and promoting radicalism is what Soros is all about.

Soros seems to want Communist China to become a superpower, throwing its weight around on the world stage. Weeks before President Obama’s visit to China a year ago the Financial Times asked Soros, “What sort of a financial deal should Obama be seeking to strike when he travels to China next month?” He replied:

I think this would be time because you really need to bring China into the creation of a new world order, a financial world order. They are kind of reluctant members of the IMF. They play along, but they don’t make much of a contribution because it’s not their institution. Their share is not commensurate, their voting rights are not commensurate to their weight, so I think you need a new world order that China has to be part of the process of creating it and they have to buy in. [emphasis added]

In November 2010 Soros praised China effusively. “Today China has not only a more vigorous economy, but actually a better functioning government than the United States,” he said.

It’s all in a day’s work for George Soros. And now he’s trying to control the media in America.

(The full article appears in the January 2011 issue of Organization Trends, a monthly publication of Capital Research Center.)

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Recap: Radical philanthropist George Soros gave $1 million to Media Matters for America, a well-funded slander shop that roots out “conservative misinformation.” It’s all part of his campaign to suppress conservative ideas that stand in the way of pushing America even farther to the left.

The left has been hyperventilating about Beck ever since he moved from CNN to Fox News in early 2009 and quickly became the Obama administration’s most vociferous high-profile critic. In particular, liberals could not abide Beck righteously fulminating against the shadowy Tides Foundation, a pass-through entity that allows wealthy individuals to give to radical causes anonymously.
Eric Boehlert, a so-called senior fellow at Media Matters, seized an opportunity when a deranged would-be shooter named Byron Williams jumped into the headlines last year. After a shootout with the California Highway Patrol, Williams said he had been on his way to shoot up the San Francisco offices of Tides in hopes of sparking a revolution. Williams was never actually much of a threat to Tides. When police pulled him over on a Sunday when the Tides offices were closed, the inept insurrectionist was drunk.

Media Matters argued that Beck had blood on his hands because Williams claimed Beck’s program was one of his favorite TV shows. Boehlert blogged that Beck “has routinely smeared the low-profile entity [i.e. Tides] for being staffed by ‘thugs’ and ‘bullies’ and involved in ‘the nasty of the nastiest,’ like indoctrinating schoolchildren and creating a ‘mass organization to seize power.’” Williams “wasn’t able to open fire inside the offices of the Tides Foundation, an organization ‘nobody knew’ about until Glenn Beck started targeting it.”

Aside from the rhetorical flourishes, Beck had provided a more or less accurate picture of the Tides Foundation, its sister groups, and many of its grant recipients.

As Trevor Loudon wrote in the October 2010 Foundation Watch, “The Tides Foundation and Tides Center are the radical left’s best kept secret. Together they provide tens of millions of dollars annually to some of the most extreme, destructive charities in America. Their money has gone to an assortment of questionable groups including ACORN, Media Matters for America, and the Center for Constitutional Rights.” (The Center was profiled in the September 2006 Organization Trends.)

According to David Horowitz’s online encyclopedia of the left, DiscoverTheNetworks.org, the Tides family of foundations has also funded the violent anarchist group known as the Ruckus Society, United for Peace and Justice (a group headed by pro-Castro activist Leslie Cagan), the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), three of whose executives have been indicted for terrorism-related activities, and the National Lawyers Guild.

NLG “began as a Communist front organization and remains proud of its lineage,” the encyclopedia notes. At a 2003 NLG convention Lynne Stewart said in a keynote address: “And modern heroes, dare I mention? Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel and Nelson Mandela and John Brown, Ché Guevara … Our quests like theirs are to shake the very foundations of the continents.” Stewart was later convicted of providing “material support” to her client sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, whose terrorist group bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six people and injuring upwards of a thousand.

Stewart, incidentally, has made no secret of her views. “I don’t believe in anarchist violence but in directed violence,” the New York Times quoted her saying in 1995. “That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions and accompanied by popular support.”

For expressing his informed opinion about Tides, Beck was described by Boehlert as something approaching a murderer. As John Sexton notes after the Byron Williams incident Boehlert viciously attacked Beck for weeks, logic and truth be damned:

Eric Boehlert, Senior Fellow at Media Matters, made much of the Beck connection saying that Beck had come close to having a “body count.” In addition to Media Matters, Boehlert’s article was picked up by major liberal sites including Current TV, Huff Post, Salon, Alternet and Truthout. But it was distributed much more widely by blogs. A Google search for the title of his piece, in quotes, yields 57,000 results. The left ate it up like cotton candy.

And Boehlert inspired others in the media to follow his lead. Just a few days after his piece made the rounds, Dana Milbank at the Washington Post (who was about to publish a book on Beck which relied heavily on Media Matters) did what amounted to a sloppy rewrite of Boehlert’s piece.

And that was really just the beginning. Over succeeding weeks, Media Matters put up dozens of stories (1,600 search results) about Byron Williams, all of them mentioning Glenn Beck. Boehlert himself returned to the topic several months later using the same extended network of liberal sites. He once again blamed the shootings on Beck.

Is turnabout fair play? In December a crazed shooter cited Media Matters as one of his inspirations.

Clay Duke, the late Florida school board shooter (who killed himself Dec. 14 after threatening officials during a school board meeting), listed Media Matters on his Facebook page as one of his favorite websites. Therefore, according to Boehlert’s reasoning, Media Matters should share some of the blame for Duke’s violent acts.

Did Boehlert’s rants push Clay Duke to act? According to Boehlert’s own logic, Media Matters has blood on its hands. Stretch Boehlert’s bizarre reasoning a little further and George Soros becomes an accomplice after the fact for funding Media Matters.

That’s crazy but it’s the kind of tortured logic that passes for thinking at Media Matters.

(Look on Big Government tomorrow for Part 3. This article is excerpted from the January 2011 issue of Organization Trends, a monthly publication of Capital Research Center.)

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Like the protagonist in the classic Orson Welles movie Citizen Kane, Soros can never have enough power. But unlike Charles Foster Kane, the haughty, imperious fictional media mogul, Soros views himself as much more than a mere leader. With a straight face he told reporters, “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” (The Independent – UK, June 3, 1993)

Although markets have helped make him a billionaire several times over, Soros has declared war on capitalism. He blames markets and something he calls “market fundamentalism”— and not the suffocating regulations and high taxes his funding of left-wing groups promotes – for the current economic slowdown. “The entire edifice of global financial markets has been erected on the false premise that markets can be left to their own devices, we must find a new paradigm and rebuild from the ground up.”

“The system we have now has actually broken down, only we haven’t quite recognized it and so you need to create a new one and this is the time to do it,” Soros told the Financial Times in 2009. In an interview with Der Spiegel the previous year Soros said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful – but also very harmful to our society.”

Only in the twisted messianic fantasies of this octogenarian billionaire whose demeanor is that of a James Bond villain could such phantom armies of marauding free market fundamentalists wreak havoc on America. Perhaps these were the same laissez-faire legionnaires who brought us Sarbanes-Oxley, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government bailouts of private industry, farm subsidies, ethanol mandates, smart growth, and the disastrous Community Reinvestment Act in recent decades.

One thing’s for certain: Soros’s answers to the nation’s problems almost invariably involve more regulation and more government intervention in the marketplace. If a policy increases the power of the state and diminishes the power of the individual, Soros is for it.

Because Soros is a lightning rod for criticism, recipients of his money often lie about taking it or perform an elaborate dance of legalistic hairsplitting to conceal the fact he is funding them. For example, Paul Steiger, editor-in-chief of the left-leaning investigative journalism website Pro Publica, denied his organization accepted funding from Soros.

In criticizing an Investor’s Business Daily editorial, Steiger wrote (Dec. 24, 2009):

An unmitigated canard quoted in the editorial – one that has a goofy way of creeping into discourse from a variety of people who dislike something we have written – is that George Soros, the global billionaire, is behind our coverage. Soros has never given us a penny, and even if he had, none of our funders know in advance what we are going to write about, nor do they have any role in deciding what stories we do or don’t do.

In fact Pro Publica’s website contradicts Steiger, openly acknowledging Soros’s Open Society Foundations as a donor.

(Surprisingly, the liberal-dominated “No Labels” group founded last month to combat what it calls the “hyper-partisanship [that] is destroying our politics and paralyzing our ability to govern,” does not appear to be connected to Soros. The new 501c4 advocacy organization has a particularly vapid slogan: “Not Left. Not Right. Forward.”)

Glenn Beck, Threat to the Republic?
Not content to rest on his laurels, Soros has been buying up media properties for years in order to drive home his message to the American public that they are too materialistic, too wasteful, too selfish, and too stupid to decide for themselves how to run their own lives.

But controlling segments of the media is not enough for him. Now he’s openly funding the fake media watchdog, Media Matters for America, founded by the formerly conservative journalist David Brock. The writers at Brock’s well-funded slander shop assiduously monitor Rush Limbaugh’s broadcasts, seethe over Andrew Breitbart’s latest expose, turn purple over Bill O’Reilly’s latest on-air editorial, and analyze every last semi-colon in Charles Krauthammer’s latest column in search of that rarest of unicorns, the beast known as “conservative misinformation.”

Soros’s donation to Media Matters suggests that intimidating journalists who dare to question his vision is now a top priority for Soros. Come down on the wrong side of an issue and risk being labeled ignorant or evil by the smear website. Say that tax cuts lead to economic prosperity, and you’re attacked. Criticize illegal immigration, and you’re attacked. Say affirmative action is racist and discriminatory, and you’re attacked.

“They are vicious. They only understand one thing: attack, attack, attack,” said GOP pollster Frank Luntz. David Folkenflik, media reporter for liberal National Public Radio, was similarly unimpressed by Media Matters. “They’re looking at every dangling participle, every dependent clause, every semicolon, every quotation to see if there’s some way it unfairly frames a cause, a party, a candidate that they may have some feelings for.”

Media Matters relies heavily on personal attacks, rather than substantive or fact-based arguments. It settles scores. Large swaths of the site are dedicated to skewering specific media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, G. Gordon Liddy and Brock’s former friend Laura Ingraham. What results is not even-handed analysis of what they say or write, but personal scrutiny, including minute parsing and microscopic analysis of every comment and its presumed meaning.

Today, Media Matters is one of the loudest voices in the liberal media echo chamber as it feeds hard-line left-wing media critiques to liberal blogs, sympathetic and lazy reporters, and pundits in an attempt to silence non-compliant journalists and muscle right-leaning media figures out of the public debate entirely.

Even before the donation, Soros and Brock already worked closely together. Before the last presidential election they collaborated on a project called Progressive Media USA that vowed to spend $40 million trashing GOP presidential candidate John McCain. Media Matters exists to help protect Democrats and harm Republicans. Even the New York Times describes the organization as “highly partisan.”

As if on cue, Media Matters, and now Soros, believe Fox News is the greatest threat to the American republic. Both Soros and Brock had always denied that the billionaire funded Media Matters—and there was no definitive evidence of such a connection— but recently Soros proclaimed himself a new donor to the organization. Said Soros

Despite repeated assertions to the contrary by various Fox News commentators, I have not to date been a funder of Media Matters. However, in view of recent evidence suggesting that the incendiary rhetoric of Fox News hosts may incite violence, I have now decided to support the organization. Media Matters is one of the few groups that attempts to hold Fox News accountable for the false and misleading information they so often broadcast. I am supporting Media Matters in an effort to more widely publicize the challenge Fox News poses to civil and informed discourse in our democracy.

In accepting a cool million from Soros, Brock promptly denounced Fox News host Glenn Beck as Public Enemy Number One.

From the moment in early 2009 that Roger Ailes enlisted Glenn Beck to the Fox News Channel’s new agenda – a battle to overturn the 2008 election results that Ailes likened to the “The Alamo” – Fox has transformed itself into a 24-7 GOP attack machine, dividing Americans through fear-mongering and falsehoods and undermining the legitimacy of our government for partisan political ends. Worse still, in recent months, Fox has allowed Glenn Beck’s show to become an out-of-control vehicle for the potential incitement of domestic terrorism. No American should be quiet about these developments – the degradation of our media and the reckless endangerment of innocent lives. George Soros, a philanthropist of the highest integrity, unfortunately knows first-hand what it’s like to be grotesquely caricatured and flatly lied about on Fox. Media Matters is grateful that he has decided to lend his voice and support our goal of greater journalistic accuracy and accountability. We are especially pleased that in this moment of hidden right-wing billionaire money corrupting our democracy, Mr. Soros, upon deciding to support our efforts, quickly and transparently has made that support public.

Only in the topsy-turvy world that Brock and other leftists occupy could holding governments accountable be considered antisocial behavior. Whatever happened to the journalists’ mantra that it was their purpose to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable? What about speaking truth to power?

(Look on Big Government tomorrow for Part 2. This article is excerpted from the January 2011 issue of Organization Trends, a monthly publication of Capital Research Center.)

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CAP Action is a sister organization to the liberal think tank, Center for American Progress.  While the Center for American Progress focuses on developing new policy ideas and on “critiquing the policy that stems from conservative values,”  CAP Action focuses on how to put those policies into action – by organizing liberal grassroots groups, labor unions and other progressive partners as advocates.

John Podesta, Chairman of the Board of Directors for CAP Action, offered the following statement in the organization’s December 9th press release:

“The Center for American Progress Action Fund is pleased to welcome Anna Burger to our Board of Directors. She has been a longtime friend of the Center for American Progress and CAP Action and we’re very happy that she has agreed to help us advance our mission by serving in this new capacity.

Anna Burger has been fighting hard for progressive ideas and policies for nearly 40 years, including the visionary leadership she has provided for the progressive movement over the past decade. We face numerous opportunities and many challenges over the next two years and look forward to Anna’s help in charting our course. As we continue to push for an economy built on a strong middle class that works for all Americans, Anna’s continued leadership and experience could not come at a more important time.”

In addition to her previous post at SEIU, Burger has held many prominent positions that have played significant roles in advancing the progressive movement, including:

• Former Chair of the Change to Win Federation, the labor coalition founded in 2005 by “reformers” who notoriously split from the AFL-CIO  to build a stronger, more progressive labor movement, based on the organizing model. (Burger resigned this post when she retired from SEIU)
• Current Board of Directors, Progressive States Network, alongside other directors such as Media Matters’ David Brock, MoveOn.org’s Wes Boyd, ACORN’s Steve Kest, AFSCME’s Lee Saunders and CAP’s John Podesta.
• Board of Directors of defunct They Work For Us/Working for Us, alongside other directors such as SEIU’s Tyrone Freeman, MoveOn.org’s Eli Pariser and Thomas Mattzie, and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga.
• Board of Directors of Economic Policy Institute, alongside other directors such as former managing director of Soros Fund Management and fellow Democracy Alliance board member Robert Johnson, The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, and most of Big Labor’s most prominent leaders, including former SEIU president Andy Stern.
• Member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board

Burger also maintains her position as Vice-Chair of the Democracy Alliance, a collaborative network of elite donors that plans and provides funding to carefully selected organizations that currently, or will be created to, serve a specific purpose within the progressive infrastructure. The organization was formed in 2005 after Rob Stein’s infamous presentation titled “The Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix”, which detailed the conservative movement’s funding and management network and sparked an appeal for a permanent progressive infrastructure.  Among the earliest beneficiaries of the Democracy Alliance were Media Matters and the Center for American Progress.

In a post I wrote this past August,  Anna Burger Quits SEIU and Change to Win to ‘Build Progressive Infrastructure’, I stated that “Burger’s departure marks not just the end of an era for SEIU, but more importantly, it’s indicative of a new era for the Progressive movement.”

This appears to remain the case.  Burger’s appointment to CAP Action seems to be yet another sign that a ‘Democracy Alliance 2.0′  is underway.

During a mid-November conference at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington DC, some of the left’s most elite political donors gathered at the $600 a night luxury hotel to plot their strategy for 2012.  Hosted by the Democracy Alliance for its 150 or so donor partners and some of its member organizations, the three-day conference focused on post-election analysis of Democratic losses and a strategy for going forward.

But the event wasn’t solely about elections.  Just as they were prior to the mid-term elections, Democrats seem to be split into two camps:  those focused on the next election’s financing, and those focused on building and maintaining a permanent progressive infrastructure.

The head of one of Democracy Alliance’s earliest spawns, Media Matters, is focused on initiatives specifically for the 2012 elections, like creating a new super-PAC.  The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent says that a source close to David Brock told him that the Media Matters founder and CEO is pitching his concept to donors as we speak.  The NY Times reports that Brock has already collected over $4 million in donation pledges for the organization, called American Bridge, and appointed Robert F. Kennedy’s eldest child and former Maryland lieutenant governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend to serve as chairwoman.

With the White House now signaling it wants outside groups on the left to ramp up for 2012, Media Matters founder David Brock is in discussions to form a new group designed to raise and spend big bucks to counter the right’s powerful new infrastructure, a person who’s spoken directly with Brock about his plans tells me…

… “David is on the road right now talking to donors and strategists who would be interested in this,” the source tells me, adding that Brock intends to create a 527, which has partial donor disclosure rules. “He’s out pitching it right now.”

“There’s a general sense that in 2010 nothing was done and it cost Democrats,” the source continues. “People realize, including in the White House, that something needs to be done in 2012 or progressives will suffer at the ballot box again.”

But Democracy Alliance donor member George Soros remains partial to this infrastructure strategy.  As I recently posted here at the Bigs, since his failed attempts at trying to oust former President George W. Bush several years ago, Soros has been committed to more long-term initiatives that would help push the country permanently to the left, and less so on elections, which are more temporary in nature.  On the heels of that conference, Soros told fellow donors that Obama Might Not Be The Best Investment, indicating the focus should remain not only on electing progressive candidates, but even more so on long term infrastructure investments.

It’s a point with which Anna Burger herself agrees.

While Soros’s comment gave some attendees the impression that he’d cheer a primary challenge to the president, the point, sources say, was different. Rather, it is time to shuffle funds into a progressive infrastructure that will take on the tasks that the president can’t or won’t take on.

“People are determined to help build a progressive infrastructure and make sure it is there not just in the months ahead but one that will last in the long term,” said Anna Burger, the retired treasury secretary of SEIU. “Instead of being pushed over by this election it has empowered people to stand up in a bigger way.”

The appointment of Anna Burger to CAP Action leverages the labor leader’s strengths both in grassroots organizing and in fund-raising.  Her existing post as Vice-Chair at the Democracy Alliance is surely an added benefit – to CAP Action and to the progressive movement as a whole.  With this rebirth of sorts we’re seeing from the Democracy Alliance as Progressives try again to consume the Democratic Party, I expect we may see other similar high profile retirements/resignations and subsequent new appointments to prominent progressive posts.

The Agenda Project has launched “F*ck Tea”, an anti-Tea Party campaign that aims to “dismiss the tea party and promote the progressive cause.”  Check out their nifty little video promoting their positive cause:

As Agenda Project founder Erica Payne explained to Politico’s Ben Smith:

“We will be launching new products in the next several months to help people all over the country F*ck Tea.  Products like a Glenn Beck Bowl Buddy (Beck B Scrubbin) and others are perfect holiday gifts or just a great way to say, ‘I love you and our country’ to your spouse, friend or family.”

The website features a variety of t-shirts and mugs imprinted with the slogan “F*uck tea,” and Ms. Payne infers there will be more to come in the future.  It also splashes a host of unsourced “Tea Party Facts” across the left side of the page, in an attempt to demean and minimize those who belong to or support the Tea Party movement, and imply that those who don’t are somehow of superior intellect based solely upon said “facts.”  Meanwhile, the site dotingly highlights the word “progress” as “a movement toward a goal; advancement; growth; development; continuous improvement,” calling it “The Real American Party.”  Frankly, I see nothing “real” about this or about any of the progressive people involved in it.

Now, I’ll admit, I’m one conservative constitutionalist who embraces the “F” word as part of my regular vocabulary, as much of a shock as that may be to leftists who may have already stereotyped me otherwise.  But I was not aware that the word had become synonymous with positive development and improvement.  (What a relief!)  If brandishing the “F” word across my chest and gallivanting in public is a sign of intellect and the new symbol of the party of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, then I’m more than happy to save my $22.50, thanks.  (Besides, if one’s cause were so important that such a word absolutely had to be used, the Libertarian in me wonders, why not just spell it out?)  Also somewhat amusing about the entire venture  is that the very people railing against the tea parties and against capitalism are shelling out over $20 a shirt for someone’s concocted-idea-turned-business-venture.  It’s the very Capitalist tale that so many of the progressive left heartily opposes.

In viewing the video that The Agenda Project posted last night, it features many Republican politicians, FOX News commentators and conservative personalities, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, former AK Governor Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Andrew Breitbart, all set in time to the words “F*ck You” being sung.  At the start of the video appears a montage of stereotypical signs that have been mainstreamed by the lamestream media as Tea Party signs.  Of course, many of those people and signs were discredited, by evidence, right from the start as having been snuck into photos by leftist plants.  But The Agenda Project saw fit to use discredited materials in its propaganda anyway.

But all of this back-story should be no surprise.  Regular readers of the Big sites have likely already recognized the name Erica Payne and The Agenda Project from another of my posts, “SEIU, HuffPo and Media Matters: Is an Unholy Alliance About to Unravel?” and from other prior posts right here on BigGovernment.com.

As we’ve previously written, Ms. Payne was an original co-founder of the Democracy Alliance, along with former Bill Clinton Treasury official Rob Stein.  That outfit was the group that spawned a host of liberal advocacy groups like Media Matters and the Center for American Progress.  Democracy Alliance was created as an umbrella to shield the donations of an elite group of ultra-wealthy liberal donors with secrecy.  Among those donors – George Soros, Susie Tompkins Buell and her husband Mark Buell, software magnate Tim Gill, and many others, including labor unions like the SEIU.  Over the years, leaked internal Democracy Alliance memos detailing various covert and overt operatives, have revealed their propagandist activities – like this memo published on Face the State in Colorado, which detailed a plan to “educate the idiots and target minorities.” Creating propaganda from bogus data and manipulating information to make it mean something else that will appeal to or anger a particular base of voters was not something new to the Democracy Alliance, nor is it new to Erica Payne.

Ms. Payne is well known both in politics and in wealthy New York fundraiser circles.  Her complete background includes heading up the liberal New Democrat Network think-tank alongside Democracy Alliance member Simon Rosenberg, who once hosted the now infamous reveal of Rob Stein’s “Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix” Powerpoint presentation on July 25, 2004.  It was their connections that first brought aboard wealthy donors George Soros, Peter Lewis, and Andy Rappaport as the earliest investors in Democracy Alliance.  Payne was also Deputy National Finance Director for the Democratic National Committee during Bill Clinton’s first presidential term and into the 1996 election, and founded the Tesseract Group, a political strategy consulting firm.  She is also a senior strategist at the Roosevelt Institute.  Payne created The Agenda Project in March, 2009.

The Agenda Project’s goal, according to its website is

“to build a powerful, intelligent, well-connected political movement capable of identifying and advancing rational, effective ideas in the public debate and in so doing ensure our country’s enduring success.”

Here’s the most ironic angle on this whole story: Erica Payne, a liberal-progressive, is also a regular commentator for FOX News.

You may remember Payne’s odd defense of SEIU on FOX News in the aftermath of the protest at the home of a Bank of America executive counsel, during which she manipulated the story to somehow blame the Tea Parties for SEIU’s despicable behavior.  Pure propaganda at its best.  And now we see it with her latest campaign.

I wonder what FOX News and their commentators have to say about Ms. Payne’s classy new business venture and about her “F*ck You” attacks against them in her organization’s new video?  Way to keep it classy, Erica Payne!  Is that the progressive way of team-building in the workplace and “advancing rational, effective ideas”?

At least now it will be even easier to identify the leftists out there.  Just look for that classy “F” word shirt – the sign of superior intellect (note sarcasm).

Today, the “Queen of Labor”, SEIU Secretary-Treasurer and Chair of the Change to Win labor federation, Anna Burger, announced her retirement.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Anna Burger was defeated by current SEIU President Mary Kay Henry when she ran against Henry for the spot vacated by outgoing President Andy Stern.  Despite that loss, Burger had insisted that she’d be staying on as Secretary-Treasurer of SEIU.  Instead, she will be replaced as the head of Change to Win by United Food and Commercial Workers president, Joe Hansen.  Henry is likely to appoint one of her own insiders as SEIU Secretary-Treasurer, a practice that was already causing tension between Burger and the new guard of SEIU (even though both guards are not all that different from one another).

Burger’s departure marks not just the end of an era for SEIU, but more importantly it’s indicative of a new era for the Progressive movement.

As I’ve recounted the history of the Democracy Alliance during a prior post about the birth of Media Matters, Anna Burger was a key player in the formation and management of Democracy Alliance.  The organization was conceived as an elite umbrella of ultra-rich liberal funders and Hollywood elite, and part of a broader plan to kill off the Democratic Party and replace it with a Progressive Party that would masquerade as the same old-school Democrats to nudge people to the left.  As I also recounted in a recent post, George Soros was an instrumental  figure in turning this blueprint into a reality.  It was first called The Phoenix Group, to represent the rising of the Phoenix from the ashes.  But after the defeat of their chosen candidate John Kerry, many of the spinoffs funded by DA eventually fizzled out, though a few do still remain quite active today, and other, stronger groups have been launched since then.  With Burger’s renewed interest in “building a sustaining progressive infrastructure”, the Phoenix Group would almost seem an appropriate title to retread.

The timing is especially interesting as well, while many of the old players from the days of DA have sprung back onto the political scene, and other partnering notables like former President Bill Clinton have begun challenging their own party operatives.  If one were to watch closely enough, the upcoming weeks may more than closely resemble the days of 2005, when the Clintons and their friends, along with Soros and Podesta, were gleefully funding candidates and building a lasting network together.  This time, all the same signs are there that figureheads are in place to buck the Democratic establishment, but perhaps with a bit more secrecy intended this time around.  Once again, Anna Burger appears poised to help lead this effort…again.  And Andy Stern, who has been traveling in recent months to states like North Carolina to build a new progressive party to go after Democrats who opposed the health care bill, is likely to be quietly walking in lock-step with his former partner in crime, so to speak.

Burger wrote in her blog post today on The Huffington Post,

I love SEIU but it’s time for me to find my new path forward. I leave SEIU knowing that in locals across our union, the next generation of leaders is ready and committed to a mission of Justice for All.

While I will continue to work with SEIU as a consultant in the years ahead finding economic solutions for working people, I will have the space to work in the broader progressive movement. I am passionate about building and sustaining the progressive infrastructure that protects American values of fairness and justice and look forward to working with a range of progressive allies to make this happen.

We have incredible opportunities as we push to make this nation a nation for all of us and recreate the American Dream.

Read Burger’s whole post here.

I’ll have more to follow on this breaking story shortly, as we learn what it means to push the nation to “Recreate the American Dream”.