Dem Rep. Ellison: Obama Meant "If You Misunderstood What I Was Trying To Say, I"m Sorry"

REP. KEITH ELLISON (D-MINN.): You know, I just want to say that I think that everything that the president said and did was in pursuit of trying to get Americans, all Americans health care. So I think even though he may have said, if you like your decent insurance, your insurance that works, then you can keep it, I think that people really get that. When — he owned it. He said, look, man, if you misunderstood what I was trying to say, I’m sorry about that.

I think that shows integrity. He didn’t do anything to self-promote. He did — what he was doing he was trying to do — to help Americans all over this country for decades.

REP. TOM COLE (R-OK): I’m going to disagree a little bit–

(CROSSTALK)

ELLISON: Intentions count.

COLE: — with Keith. We knew back in 2009, 2010, this was going to happen. The Congressional Budget Office put out studies about it. We made the points, and we know now the administration had plenty of documents.

(CROSSTALK)

COLE: — were going to lose health care here. So I think this does get to credibility as well as competence.

ELLISON: These plans actually, many of these, these high-deductible, high-exclusion plans, they don’t — they were not quality plans in many cases. And the fact is, they were for a small — they might work for somebody who had a lot of money saved up, but for other folks, they just didn’t. There’s a reason those premiums were low.

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Dem Rep. Ellison: Obama Meant "If You Misunderstood What I Was Trying To Say, I"m Sorry"

Was the Attempted War with Syria Meant to Fail in Order to Shift the Entire World Against the U.S.?

When the war with Syria failed miserably and all the escalated rhetoric for a global war came to a direct halt, people believed that our leaders listened and caved in to the demands of We the People. We thought we had the power to finally push back these elitists who have manipulated us all this time. While it may seem that we did just that, was it just another part of the elitists plan? Was it both a distraction and intentionally done in order to make the U.S. out to be the enemy and to turn the U.N. and the entire world against the U.S.?

If so, it would symbolize the dramatic shift from military warfare to social warfare. All the elites have done so far and are continuing to do is implement a social change rather than a military change, as social control rather than military dominance seems to be the key here.  

During the events leading up to an all-out war with Syria, Putin and Snowden were portrayed as saviors and heroes to our country and the world. Putin got world leaders together and made Obama look like a deliberate fool in front of the entire world and Snowden supposedly exposed the NSA to both the U.S. and everywhere else. Now, Merkel and other world leaders are angered by it in an almost orchestrated fashion.

With NSA spying on people, our treasonous government issuing threats, using false evidence and funding Syrian Rebels (aka the enemy, Al-CIA-da), our whole criminal government’s agenda, as well as the British agenda is being publicly exposed. Then you have the Prime Minister being voted down in parliament for the first time in decades, China and the BRIC countries creating an alternate currency, an alternate Internet and handing over more power and control to the U.N. This ALL had to be a part of their NWO plan!

When Syria intentionally worked with Russia after Putin, in an almost pre-meditated movement, jumped at the moment of subscribing to Obama’s demands of having Syria submit its chemical weapons to the U.N., it all seemed too convenient and designed to make it look like a “miracle” had been pulled off at the last minute.

So now that the “miracle” was pulled off, the momentum and social mechanism began to shift and did a complete 180 degree turn, as the Syrian rebels, funded by Al-CIA-da and our infamous government, attacked the U.N. inspectors. There’s no way this also could have been a mistake or a desperate move. It had to have been done for a reason which may have been to create a social change and to turn the world against the U.S. and therefore create further animosity towards America.

Back home, we have plenty of distractions of our own. The threat of drills becoming real, the ever-growing police state tactics, illegal immigration, jobs, government shutdown, social disorder, as well as secession movements, the rejection of the U.N. Small Arms Treaty and the biggest distraction of all, Obamacare!

Obamacare is probably never meant to launch, as it seems to be merely a program designed to be the breaking point for the coming war with the U.N. No one wants it and We the People are ready to go to war over it if we have to.

In the meantime, the U.N. is trying to put pressure on our government to follow their U.N. global plan and charter. Obama’s role as Hitler is soon coming to an end and the U.N. troops are just waiting to step in. Our country’s fragile bubble state is ready to pop!

In addition, don’t forget we have Fukushima radiation and the HAARP weapon to worry about, which was also designed to destroy America. There is a reason why the government has stockpiled and set up underground bunkers for the past decade or so. They knew this would happen, as they planned it. An extreme false flag is coming. The surface will most likely be vaporized, while those underground will be watching the show on their monitors in their bunkers, waiting for the dust to clear so they can come out of their hole in the ground and claim their fame to whatever is left of it.

In analyzing the secession movements, although they may be a sign of rebelliousness against our government, they also seem to be used to divide us like the FEMA regions, in order to make it easier for the U.N. to come in and take us apart piece by piece. Furthermore, since the revolution will not be televised, they probably feel that by doing this, they will be able to accomplish their goal.

This is why it is urgent that we take back the MSM airwaves and not just use the alternative media outlets. I cannot emphasize enough to everyone how important it is that we broadcast the truth on the MSM airwaves, as it will not only be an extreme boost in morale factor to America (think of the movie, “V for Vendetta”), but it will be seen as one to the people who are being manipulated by their own governments throughout the rest of the world as well. Think about it. It could be hailed as the greatest pinnacle in the history of the entire world!

If we can expose their program on the MSM, the elitist rats will have no choice but to run, as their psychological manipulation through fear and torture will immediately come to an end, as their propaganda machine (their mechanism of social warfare) will explode in their face. The social war will be over and we will be free once again.

Remember, this is more of a social communications war than a conventional military one. As in all wars, whether foreign or domestic, the first thing to capture is the communications and our situation as American Nationals is no exception.

Like Hitler’s turning point in WWII at Normandy and how the Allied forces pushed back Germany and eventually setup the U.N., Obama’s turning point seemed to be at Syria and now the world government, world media and even RT News is doing whatever they can to turn the countries of the world on America and join together to push America back and take us over, so they can complete their NWO global government. History seems to be repeating itself right before our eyes.

It’s no mistake that our borders are open and that our ships are still in the Middle East. We are going to be invaded. It’s as inevitable as our coming financial collapse. The only thing that can stop it is if We the People rise up and take back control of our communications and our country. Otherwise, those who have firearms in our country will be seen as the enemy to the new U.N. government. Those who do not follow the U.N. world government, even if they also do not follow our treasonous government, will be executed. That is why they seem to be trying to get more sheeple to embrace Putin and the U.N. This is controlled opposition and is a grave threat that must be eliminated.

We are being setup for a U.N. global takeover and anyone who does not embrace the blue helmets will be purged from the NWO system.

At this point, it is imperative that we regain control of our MSM communications, arrest our treasonous government, bring our troops home and secure our borders with whatever troops, patriots and able-bodied people we have left.

We the People are being setup for a massive attack. It’s up to us to decide the fate our country and our lives.

War is coming and is already knocking at our door. It’s time for us to place our firearms through the peephole, cock them and get ready to pull the trigger.

So what’s it gonna be? Are we men or mice?

Was the Attempted War with Syria Meant to Fail in Order to Shift the Entire World Against the U.S.?

Shape-Shifting by Liberal Dark Money Groups Seems Meant to Confuse

Here’s what we’ve learned about the evolving identity of the first group, Citizens for Strength and Security:

Through it all, the various groups seemed to have many of the same addresses and board members in common.

To elaborate: In its first year, Citizens for Strength and Security (then ASQHC) raised $ 47 million with a staff of only two people. The pair — who appear to have been employees of the consulting firm Hilltop Public Solutions — worked an average of two hours a week. They drew no salary from the group, but two firms that share an address with Hilltop – SA Productions and Data  and S&B Public Solutions LLC — were paid more than $ 3.4 million for “issue advocacy” and “coalition management” in 2009 and 2010.  

In 2009, the vast majority of ASQHC’s spending went toward media production and airtime — with at least $ 40 million being paid to the shadowy consulting firm Waterfront Strategies, a unit of the big media firm GMMB, which did work for President Obama’s campaign, among others. Waterfront was one of twelve contractors, other than SA Productions, to receive at least $ 100,000 from ASQHC. Since tax-exempt groups are required to list only their top five contractors, we don’t know who else is on the list.  

One of the only non-advocacy expenditures made by ASQHC came in the form of a $ 1.24 million grant to another “social welfare” organization called Foundation for Patients Rights — not to be confused with Center to Protect Patient Rights. That grant made up the entirety of FPR?s 2009 revenues, and most of that money ($ 1.1 million) subsequently went right out the door as spending on ?media.? (FPR never filed any reports with the FEC, but it’s possible the organization ran “issue ads” that it didn’t have to report to the election agency.)

The Foundation for Patients Rights terminated the following year, after only 15 months in existence — entirely funded by ASQHC’s grants. But before shutting down, it spent more than $ 800,000 on ?ads and production.” It also gave $ 180,000 to ASQHC’s union- and industry-backed 527, not its 501(c)(4) — the latter being where all the money had come from to begin with. The “Health Care” component of the groups’ name was gone by this time, though. The 527 receiving the money was called Citizens for Strength and Security. Grantor and grantee shared the same address — a UPS store in Washington, D.C.

Thus, money that had begun in a social welfare group’s account wound its way through another 501(c)(4) and ended up with an arm of the originating group that had fewer restrictions on its political spending. And in fact, the CSS 527 raised and spent close to $ 10 million, most of it in 2010. One of its top contributors was the Democratic Governors Association, which gave it $ 3.3 million that year.

That same year, 2010, Americans for Stable Quality Care changed its name to Citizens for Strength and Security Action Fund and filed its first spending reports with the FEC — using the M St. address of another group, Patriot Majority USA (about which we’ll have more later). It reported $ 1.4 million in spending to the FEC, but the group told the IRS it spent $ 9.3 million on ?media buys and production expenses? — most of it going once again to Waterfront Strategies. (As before, some of it may have been used for issue ads not reported to election authorities, but the IRS doesn’t require detailed spending reports.)

Like other (c)(4)s, CSS Action Fund can keep its donors’ identities secret. But one surprising benefactor has come to light: the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association.  Its $ 2.5 million grant – first reported by the Center for Public Integrity – made up about 19 percent of CSS Action Funds’s total revenues in 2010. 

In 2011, CSS Action Fund shut its doors. But the same year, a 501(c)(4) called Citizens for Strength and Security Fund (minus the “Action”) set up shop at the old Foundation for Patients Rights address — which a recent Frontline documentary revealed to be a UPS store. And its board members are the same as those of the old CSS 527, Lora Haggard and Jeremy Van Ess. The latter is connected with Hilltop. The new (c)(4) went on to fund its own super PAC, called simply Citizens for Strength and Security.

The new (c)(4) group had a new address and a new employer identification number (the IRS assigns a unique EIN to every distinct organization that has employees) but it was still linked to figures close to the old organization. Its mission, too, was the same, except for the deletion of “health care” from the description — the Affordable Care Act having already been signed into law.  

Neither of the two 501(c)(4) groups in the Citizens for Strength and Security family appear to have sought exempt status from the IRS — or if they did, they don’t appear to have received it, something that would have been highly unusual. Still, more than $ 60 million flowed through these organizations, much of it going into the political arena.

Patriot Majority

Citizens for Strength and Security is not alone in the process of surreptitious rebirth. Another liberal group, Patriot Majority USA — some of whose activities OpenSecrets Blog first reported last year — has been engaged in a similar evolution, employing some of the same tactics that seem designed to mask the doings of the complicated constellation of organizations known as Patriot Majority.

The network includes multiple 527s, a super PAC, and a 501(c)(4). Its 501(c)(4) arm has been killed off twice, each time rising anew.

The first iteration of the group, Patriot Majority for a Stronger America, began as the 501(c)(4) ?Midwest Alliance for Better Government? in 2006. It shut its doors in 2009. Meanwhile, though, another (c)(4), American Alliance for Economic Development, had been formed in 2008 with the same employees — none of whom drew a salary — at the same address. (It was also the same address that Citizens for Strength and Security Action Fund, the group discussed above, would use in later FEC filings.)

In 2010, American Alliance changed its name to Patriot Majority USA. Then, as OpenSecrets Blog reported last year, Patriot Majority USA gave large sums of money to two politically active, liberal 501(c)(4)s — America Votes and VoteVets. Both of these groups then gave large grants to Patriot Majority’s own political 527 account. In essence, money appears to have gone from Patriot Majority USA’s nondisclosing social welfare account through two other social welfare groups, ultimately making its way into Patriot Majority’s 527 account.

In 2011, Patriot Majority USA began using a P.O. box as its mailing address, then filed a termination report. The same year, another 501(c)(4) called Patriot Majority USA — housed at that very same P.O. box, boasting the same board, and even listing the terminated Patriot Majority USA as an affiliate — filed its initial tax return. It would be Patriot Majority USA version 3.0 that would end up being the first to report to the FEC making direct, political expenditures — rather than passing the money first through a super PAC or 527.  

The latest iteration of Patriot Majority USA was very active in the 2012 campaign season, telling the FEC it spent $ 7 million on ads. Yet despite the fact that it is not supposed to be primarily a political organization, it doesn’t appear to have done much since the elections. Its YouTube page has not been updated in the six months since early November, and its homepage — which, structurally, has been virtually unchanged through the last two versions of the organization — has been stripped down to bare-bones auto-updating content such as a sidebar of “this day in history” facts. 

IRS Oversight 

No one affiliated with Patriot Majority or Citizens for Strength and Security responded to our repeated requests to explain why they engage in this complicated process of reincarnation and money shuffling. We tried all of the phone numbers listed on the Citizens for Strength & Security documents, and we contacted Hilltop Public Solutions. Nobody would comment. Craig Varoga, who has overseen the Patriot Majority groups, also did not respond to calls or emails. (Varoga is not anxious to be found; year after year, he lists “no@email” in the email address field on IRS forms for his organization.)

Nonprofit experts contacted by OpenSecrets Blog could not think of a practical motivation for their actions. “It?s hard to tell what is going on here,” said Marcus Owens, former head of the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations division, “but starting and terminating organizations makes it more difficult for the IRS to identify who did what when.”  

Ellen Aprill, professor of tax law at Loyola University in Los Angeles, speculated that the groups might have feared they’d violated a tax rule and decided it was better to dissolve “either to be good going forward or, if we were to take a cynical, Machiavellian view, to continue to ignore rules by operating briefly and then dissolving to do the same thing again.”

What we do know is that the IRS is not an agency built for political oversight or transparency, and these groups could very well be using the agency’s weaknesses as an added layer of cover for their activities.  

The IRS’s primary legal responsibility is to protect information, rather than disclose it, and that is reflected in almost every aspect of the nonprofit infrastructure.  Groups are not required to get the agency’s blessing to claim 501(c)(4) status, and if they don’t they aren’t included in the IRS summary data listing all the tax-exempt organizations it oversees. Annual tax filings are submitted long after they are relevant; even after they’re filed, the IRS doesn’t provide them  — nor any of the relevant data — online or in machine-readable format.  

On the rare occasion that an organization’s exempt status is revoked or denied, little to nothing about it is public. As we described in part five of our recent Shadow Money Magic report, the IRS doesn’t tell the FEC or the public that the group might be required to disclose its donors. Rather, most groups could simply pay their federal income taxes and fade away, except in cases of prominent organizations like Crossroads GPS — which applied for exempt status nearly three years ago and has yet to receive it. (This week a Crossroads spokesman told the Los Angeles Times that his group may have been a victim of the IRS’ heightened scrutiny of conservative groups.) Denial letters are made public only after they are scrubbed of all identifying information. Furthermore, formal denials are often unnecessary because, according to Lois Lerner, IRS Director of Exempt Organizations, “many organizations withdraw their application for exemption when they learn that a denial is forthcoming.”

For its part, Citizens for Strength and Security doesn’t appear to ever have sought exempt status for either of its 501(c)(4) incarnations. Patriot Majority USA, on the other hand, applied for, and received, exempt status at least twice, according to its most recent letter granting exempt status, obtained by OpenSecrets Blog. In that letter and the accompanying documents, Patriot Majority USA acknowledged that it had “substantially similar activities and goals” as the old Patriot Majority USA, which it refers to in the filing by its previous name, Alliance for Economic Development.

In the document, it also explains that it had no intentions of hiring employees, opting instead to depend on “a large base of volunteers who will be responsible for contributing to, developing, and disseminating the organization’s message.”  At the time it filed its first annual filing, the organization boasted about $ 2.9 million in revenues, but no volunteers.  

In the course of their evaluation of Patriot Majority USA’s request for exempt status, IRS staffers don’t appear ever to have inquired about Patriot Majority USA’s previous two iterations, and the third incarnation was granted exempt status once again, after a wait of only three months. That was in 2011, a time when many other organizations waited far longer to receive approval as IRS staffers screened (often inappropriately) applicants for hidden political agendas. Ironically, this group’s application sailed through though its name contained the word “patriot,” one of the terms the IRS supposedly looked for, according to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration.

However, in a final twist, it now appears that the IRS might have revoked the tax exempt status of the last two versions of Patriot Majority USA. The IRS data that includes listings of all exempt organizations no longer contains records for the group. Washington, D.C.’s Corporations Division still lists Patriot Majority as and there are few other explanations for its absence from the list. “It could mean that their status was revoked after an audit and for cause,” tax attorney Owens says.

But that’s between Patriot Majority USA and the IRS. The public won’t be told anything, and the FEC won’t be notified. The donors behind the millions spent by Patriot Majority in the 2012 election will remain safely on the dark side of Section 6103 of the US Code.   

Reporting intern Janie Boschma contributed to this post.

Image: Ball of tangled wire via BigStockPhoto.com.

OpenSecrets Blog

Shape-Shifting by Liberal Dark Money Groups Seems Meant to Confuse