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Townhall...
Barack Obama's
"Social Innovation" Slush Fund
By Michelle Malkin
Jun 14, 2013
We all know now what the vengeful Obama IRS has been doing to
conservative nonprofits the past four years: strangling them in the
crib. But do you know how much pampering and largesse far-left
welfare-state charities have received while limited-government groups
suffered? You don't know the half of it.
Before President Obama took office, I warned that Democrats planned to
steer untold amounts of taxpayer dollars to his shady
community-organizing pals. The Dems' 2008 party platform proposed the
creation of a "Social Investment Fund Network" to subsidize "social
entrepreneurs and leading nonprofit organizations (that) are assisting
schools, lifting families out of poverty, filling health care gaps and
inspiring others to lead change in their own communities."
Investigative journalist James O'Keefe's pioneering work helped bring
down the fraudsters of ACORN. But a thousand other ACORN-style
knockoffs have metastasized in the shadows. Not long after Obama took
office, big-government Democrats and Republicans handed him the $6
billion mandatory "volunteerism" package known as the "SERVE America
Act." The boondoggle fueled legions of new government "volunteers,"
including a Clean Energy Corps, an Education Corps, a Healthy Futures
Corps, a Veterans Service Corps and an expanded National Civilian
Community Corps for disaster relief and energy conservation.
In addition to creating thousands of make-work jobs and boosting
bloated national service bureaucracies, the legislation also carved out
a left-wing slush fund known as the Social Innovation Fund. In its
four-year existence, SIF has doled out $140 million to 20 handpicked
grant-making organizations, which in turn have chosen 197 "promising
nonprofits" for government support.
Obama promised "accountability" measures to ensure the money is spent
wisely. But who has been assessing the effectiveness of the spending?
As I reported at the outset, it's interest-conflicted foxes in the
social entrepreneurship community guarding the government-grant
henhouse.
For the rest of this article, click here
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