Organizing for Action = NEA National Membership Strategy
It’s no wonder this secret Obama group won’t disclose the secret location of their meeting next week. Wealthy donors to Organizing for Action, a secret group affiliated with the Obama Administration, will hold a secret meeting in the nation’s capital. Why should you care?
This organization is housed in the National Education Association’s National Headquarters, a nearly block-long building on prestigious 16th Street, N.W., home to embassies and airline headquarters, just blocks from the White House, AFL-CIO headquarters, and the Laborers International Union of North America. This is a prime DC real estate enclave.
Teachers, read about where your dues are going now. Lachlan Markay has the story in the Washington Free Beacon Online.
Organizing for Action (OFA), a 501(c)(4) advocacy group created by President Barack Obama’s former campaign manager, will hold an event called the “founders summit” in a Washington hotel on Wednesday, March 13, according to an NPR report.
According to the New York Times, donors will pay $50,000 to attend the event, where they can brush shoulders with OFA chair Jim Messina and Jon Carson, the group’s executive director and the former director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.
For $500,000, donors will enjoy a spot on OFA’s national advisory board, which gives them direct access to the president and other top administration officials. Government watchdog groups have blasted the scheme as a transparent pay-to-play arrangement.
Staff at the organization’s downtown Washington, D.C., office would not answer questions about the event. . . Their refusal to disclose information on the event coincided with attempts by OFA to reassure critics that the organization will be transparent and ethical. Messina has rejected claims it will allow wealthy individuals to influence administration policy.
Business Forward, a left-wing group whose major corporate donors enjoy access to administration officials, invited business representatives to an unveiling event for OFA in January.
“For the next few years, there will be much more alignment between the business community and the administration,” Business Forward president Jim Doyle told Time’s Swampland blog.
Messina’s insistence that OFA will refuse corporate contributions also leaves the group with ample opportunities for financing through the nation’s largest labor unions, which he excluded from the list of groups that will be barred from donating to OFA.
That loophole is underscored by OFA’s apparently close relationship with the nation’s largest teachers’ union. The group’s office is located on the fourth floor the National Education Association’s Washington D.C. headquarters, in an office labeled “National Membership Strategy.”
The NEA did not respond to multiple requests for information on the nature of its arrangement or cooperation with OFA.