Obama's Organizing For America Initiative Is Another Foray Into Hypocrisy

Remember when Obama used to slam Americans for Prosperity?  AFP surely does, and released this new video showing the administration’s overt hypocrisy when they created Organizing for America.  It’s part of a longer record of Obama going against his liberal sensibilities in order to win.

First, Obama slams super pacs, and then starts his own.  He talked about how bad outsourcing is damaging the American economy, and it’s the Republicans who are peddling this shift, even though some of his top donors, like Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks, sent animation jobs over to India.  In a post I wrote for Hot Air last summer:

according to William Bigelow of Breitbart.com, “Obama’s second largest fundraiser [at the time] is John Rogers, the CEO of investment giant Ariel Capital Management. He has raised more than $1.5 million for Obama’s reelection campaign. Bully for him, except for one thing: Ariel Capital Management owns a $48.6 million stake in Accenture, which just happens to be, according to the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals, the nation’s ‘best’ outsourcer.”

He claimed that GM is back in action during the 2012 campaign, even though they’re shipping their jobs overseas as well.  Paul Roderick Gregory of Forbes wrote back in August of last year that:

according to Obama, GM does everything right. It offers high-paying jobs to American workers. It invests at home. GM put American manufacturing back in the high-tech race on American soil. The new GM is good for America, and America is good for GM, as a former GM chairman declared in 1953. GM is back where it should be.

We need to look no further than General Motors’ own figures to  learn that GM outsources almost two thirds of its jobs overseas. Less than one in five GM vehicles are manufactured in the United States.

To be exact: GM’s December 31, 2011 annual reportshows General Motors of North America accounting for 98,000  of the 207,000 GM jobs worldwide. But 12,000 of these jobs are in Canada and 11,500 are in Mexico.  Accordingly, GM has 74,500 jobs in the United States and 122,500 abroad, even after Obama’s touted surge in Detroit jobs.  Almost two thirds of  GM’s jobs are in other countries.

GM’s outsourcing is not a slip. GM clearly states that foreign investment and  outsourcing of jobs are an integral parts of its growth strategy.

Grace D. Lieblein, President and CEO of GM Mexico, for example,  proudly announced in a GM Mexico press release:

“75 years ago, General Motors came to our country with a dream to fulfill: turning Mexico into a prosperous nation for the benefit of millions of families. Today, after 75 years into the adventure, we have achieved goals that seemed unattainable, thanks to the efforts and dedication of Mexican talent. During the 75 years GM Mexico has been in operation, the subsidiary has produced 7 million vehicles, 20 million engines, and 4 million transmissions. GM Mexico employs 11,500 direct and about 90,000 indirect employees.”

So it now appears that GM’s goal is to make Mexico prosperous, not the good old US of A! In the same press release, GM heralds its upcoming billion dollar investments in its Mexican plants (versus a $100 million investment in Rochester, New York).

Now, with this new venture into tax-exempt/non-profit land, it’s just shameless.  Talk is cheap in politics, and it’s something my generation needs to become cognizant of – as they begin to slowly wake up from the Obama nightmare in the next four years.  As AFP’s Director of Public Relations, Levi Russell aptly said:

Sadly most of us have gotten used to politicians saying one thing and doing the opposite – but sometimes even jaded cynics like myself encounter a level of hypocrisy so overt, it’s impossible to ignore. That moment happened this month when Team Obama reorganized as a 501-C4 called Organizing for Action.

While I certainly don’t begrudge Obama for making use of such an organization and taking donations from whoever he wishes, the hypocrisy of doing so is jaw-dropping given the President practically made a part-time job out of bashing groups like Americans for Prosperity and others for… being organized as a 501-C4. The entire Left and many in the media got in on the action, even coining scary sounding monikers like ‘dark money’ to further the Obama rhetoric.

The cognitive dissonance required to now fully embrace this structure gives me a headache just thinking about it. But then again, I’m a conservative and I like things to make sense.”

Oh, and speaking of corporate influences, Ken Vogel at Politico reported last month that:

In its first days, Organizing for Action has closely affiliated itself with insider liberal organizations funded by mega-donors like George Soros and corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Citi and Duke Energy. And it has quietly sought support from the same rich donors who backed Obama’s campaigns, asking for help from Democratic donors and bundlers in town for the Inauguration at a closed-door corporate-sponsored confab that featured Bill Clinton as the keynote speaker.

In fact, invitations for the Saturday meeting at the Newseum where Organizing for Action was unveiled for the liberal big-money set came from Obama’s National Finance Committee (one member of which gave a transferable ticket to POLITICO), as well as the Presidential Inaugural Committee, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters.

Dubbed the “Road Ahead” meeting, the conference was sponsored by a White House-allied trade association called Business Forward, which is funded by major corporations including Microsoft, Walmart and PG&E – each of which sent senior executives to participate in a panel on how to boost American economic competitiveness.

Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager and the Organizing for Action national chairman, and OfA Director Jon Carson, pleaded with invited big donors to support the new group. “We need you. This president needs you,” Messina said, adding Organizing for Action was “building a national advisory board filled with people in this room.”

Carson told the donors, who were treated to cocktails and light hors d’oeuvres after the day’s sessions, “there’s going to be a place for each and every one of you.”

Grassroots activists? They got their own pitch the next day at a bigger, no-invitation-necessary gathering called the “Obama Campaign Legacy Conference” held at the Washington Hilton. There, Carson told reporters that OfA would “absolutely” be funded mostly by grassroots donors like those Obama highlighted in his campaign, rather than big corporate donors.